Dictatorship Simulator Design Document

This is the design document I created for my Writing and Research course, in which we learned about forms of academic writing and research through creating a game to model a real-world phenomenon and then recording and analyzing the results of playtesting. For my game, I created an online asynchronous board game modeling authoritarian power dynamics, which I then playtested with three separate groups of players.

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This piece, aside from demonstrating my ability to adapt complex topics into game mechanics and design novel rulesets, also hopefully demonstrates my ability to communicate complex information in an understandable and concise manner. These rules were ultimately unfortunately not as easy to understand for my players as I had hoped, and I believe I have improved significantly since this was written, but I still consider this to be a strong example of my communicative skill and ability to write technically and creatively (as well as, hopefully, a point of comparison showing how far I've come).