The One Who Stepped Forward

Suzerain is a text-based political simulation set in Sordland, a fictional republic emerging from decades of coups, civil war and one-party rule. The player governs as its fourth president, Anton Rayne, for a single four-year term, played out in eleven turns of uneven length. Each turn brings cabinet meetings, bills to sign or veto, negotiations with party factions, oligarchs and foreign leaders, and a family that expects him home for dinner. The game has a strong reputation for taking politics seriously. At least one critic has admired how little it lets the player see of the consequences of their choices, and at least one academic paper recommends it for teaching media literacy, precisely because its newspapers are partisan and its information murky.

I played it twice, the first time into the tenth turn and the second time only as far as the fourth, and stopped both times before the end. Between and after the two runs I did something most players will not bother to do: I extracted the game's dialogue database, news archive and bill data from my installed copy, read the scripts that decide how its economy and elections are scored, and checked them against my save files. This essay is the result. It is partly a record of one presidency and partly an argument about what Suzerain's design actually rewards, and the two are hard to separate, because the thing that went wrong in Sordland was not only the economy.

The essay moves outward from the president, ring by ring: the strangers waiting at a factory gate, then his family, then his own party, then the rules of the game that none of them — and not the player either — can see, then the neighbouring countries, then the fall and the question of whether all this is satire, and finally what the rules reward. Readers who have never played need to know only that Sordland is poor, recently ruled by a colonel, and governed by a president who answers to an Assembly his party does not fully control.

The president in this account is played by someone who decided, from the start, to govern on principle.

The gates

By his third month in office, President Rayne has done most of what the leaders of Sordland's workers could reasonably have asked of him. When the government was forced to choose between rescuing failing businesses and relieving struggling households, he chose the households. When Bernard Circas, a labour MP and novelist, was shot on inauguration night, he attended the funeral, though it was politically awkward to do so. When protests spread across the country, he went out to visit the affected towns rather than give the police more men and money. In his first week he vetoed a campaign finance bill that would have pushed the small parties of the left out of the Assembly.

Then he travels to the industrial city of Narbel to negotiate with Gasom, the national energy company, which is losing money and laying off workers. His predecessor, Ewald Alphonso, owns a large stake in it and makes the company's case in person. The president is asked to put public money into Gasom. He refuses, and the talks collapse. A crowd of Gasom workers has gathered at the gates, led by Katarina Horten of the Labour Union and Denis Stahler of the Communist Party. The game offers the president a choice: he can leave by Alphonso's helicopter, or walk out and speak to them.

He walks out. What he hears is this.

"Empty words, Rayne! You've shown us nothing concrete today. We're fed up with your hollow rhetoric!"

"All talk and no action, isn't it, Mr. President? How long must the workers wait for real change?"

When the development minister, Gus Manger, steps in to defend him, Horten answers that all they have seen are "decisions that favor the likes of you and Ewald Alphonso, not the common workers." The president has, at that moment, just refused Alphonso's request for money. Stahler adds that ensuring "a fair, dignified life for the working class" is "something your policies have consistently failed to do."

It is worth noticing what they do not say. The game has prepared accusations for a president who rescued businesses, skipped the funeral, flooded the streets with police or called the protesters traitors. Rayne did none of those things, so none of those lines appear. What remains is the one decision he did take — refusing to put public money, with no conditions attached, into a loss-making company in which his predecessor held a large stake — and a verdict on everything: empty words, no action, nothing for the workers. Nor, in the entire exchange, does either leader mention the conservative bloc that dominates the Assembly, the Old Guard officials around the former dictator, or the men who would later be tied to the murder of their own MP. The president is the only person in Sordland they address.

One of the answers the game gives him is an attempt at reason: "It's easy to criticize from the sidelines, but real change requires pragmatism, not idealism." It does not help. Moments later a man lunges at him out of the crowd. His driver, Serge, wrestles the attacker to the ground; the presidential guard closes in and hustles him to the convoy; the police charge into the protest swinging their batons. As the car pulls away, protesters beat their fists against the windows.

The next morning's papers form an unusual consensus. The Holsord Post, the establishment daily, calls the refusal to invest "a shameful display for our nation" and "an open door to foreign influence." Sordland Today headlines its piece "Abdicating Responsibility." And The Radical, the anti-establishment paper whose pages are full of attacks on "corporate favoritism," describes the decision not to put public money into a former president's company as "a strategic blunder." The workers had accused him of serving capital; the press, left and right, now accused him of failing to fund it.

The second time this president stood at the gates of Gasom, he took the helicopter. I know why, because I was the player behind him both times, and those gates were the first place I learned what Sordland does to people who come out to meet it.

Home

The game decides early on that Rayne loves his wife, and it does not ask the player's opinion.

In the prologue, at university, Rayne's closest friend, Petr Vectern, introduces him to a classmate named Monica. The narration then offers a half-sentence — "You were immediately attracted to..." — and three ways of finishing it: her beauty, her intelligence, or her diligence. I was curious what difference the choice made, so I looked. All three answers lead to the same next line, and none of them sets a variable. The game does not remember why the player fell in love; it only needed the player to have done so. "Love grew between the two of you," the narrator says, and a few lines later there is a wedding in Holsord.

Twenty years on, the First Lady wants a political role of her own. Her first request is to replace the mayor of Anrica, Curtan Leste, as the speaker at the opening of the Benfi Festival, the most watched public event of the year, and to use the platform to talk about the discrimination Sordish women face. "I just need your blessing as my husband and the President of Sordland," she says. He declines. At the festival itself she confronts Leste regardless, and the mayor shuts her down in front of the cameras. The game keeps a running score of her regard for her husband, and over the course of that one chapter it falls from ten to four. The household goes cold for the next three turns.

It thaws on her terms. In the eighth turn the president walks into a cabinet meeting on women's rights and finds his wife sitting beside the education minister, Ciara Walda, without having been told she would be there. "I just thought you would say no again," Monica explains. "So when Ciara asked me to join her today, I had to accept." She concedes that she does not "understand politics the way you and Ciara do," but insists her role would only be that of a spokeswoman, and that this is "bigger than just politics." When the president finally agrees — "If you are willing to take the risk, I will let you do it" — she replies, "I was born ready," and the frost lifts.

He does more than agree. He sets up a women's rights commission with her at its head, signs a law making domestic violence a crime for the first time in Sordland's history, and makes what the press calls "an unusually large out-of-pocket donation" to the Sordish League of Women. Her regard for him, by the game's count, rises by one point. The Radical asks its readers whether the donation is "fem-washing or the real deal," and wonders aloud whether it is "an empty gesture."

One detail seems to me especially revealing. When the president wants to keep his wife out of government, the game supplies him with reasons: a deal with a rival, a wish to protect her, "You're a First Lady, not a politician." What he can never do is the one thing a careful president might: support the cause while questioning the process — object not to women's rights, but to his wife acquiring an official role in his government because she is his wife. The game has the concept; in a final-turn scene my first playthrough never reached, an investigator accuses the agriculture minister of "a direct conflict of interest." Inside the president's household, the only grounds for refusal on offer are a bargain, condescension or prejudice, so any refusal can be read only as a defect of character.

I should be clear about where I stand. My president signed the domestic violence law, gave the First Lady the leadership she wanted and paid into her cause out of his own pocket. My objection is not to the cause. It is to a structure in which every cost of advancing it — budget, political capital, the marriage itself — falls on the president, while those demanding it are never asked what it costs, and in which every hesitation is treated as a judgement on the kind of husband he is.

Ciara Walda deserves a closer look. She is the minister of education in his own cabinet, and in her first briefing she told him, "I'm not a supporter of the private sector in education." The first time her programme ran short of money, a turn later, she proposed selling schools to private buyers. When the education reform later stalled for want of funds, she raised it in front of the cabinet: "Also, we all know why the education reforms failed. Don't we?" The narration adds: "Ciara looked at me."

At the women's rights meeting she presents her bills as "greater productivity, a better economy and happier women" — in the game's data the law he signed does nothing for the economy — adds that "you'd have to be a fool not to pass them," and, when persuasion runs out, observes that passing them "could help silence any of the public's lingering questions regarding your former vice president." This is also the minister who, back in the third turn, when Lileas Graf wished a trade delegation well with "May the Lord be with them," rolled her eyes across the cabinet table and, caught, explained that "religion has no place at a government budget meeting." It is a small scene, but it shows her deciding, on everyone's behalf, which convictions are fit to be spoken in public life and which are not. Every political camp has people like Ciara Walda: the cause is always right, so the critic is always wrong; the costs always belong to someone else, and so, when it fails, does the blame.

I found Monica and Ciara harder to bear than any of the president's open enemies. Gloria Tory — the speaker of the Assembly and leader of the conservative wing of the president's own party, of whom more in the next section — never pretended to be on his side. They did, and they used that — the shared cause, the marriage, the cabinet seat one of them held in his own government — as leverage against him.

The party

The project at the centre of Rayne's term is a new constitution. The one in force was written under Colonel Tarquin Soll, the soldier who founded the United Sordland Party and ruled the country for two decades; its ten-percent election threshold keeps small parties out of the Assembly, and two of its articles are read, by the Bludish and by the liberal opposition, as licensing discrimination against minorities. My president drafted a genuinely democratic replacement, which is the main reason the conservatives in his own party came to hate him.

To get it through the Assembly he did something he had promised himself he would not do. He spent his own money on lobbyists to soften up the deputies. It is the kind of compromise a player makes after being told repeatedly that idealism does not pass laws, and it bought, as I later found in the vote-counting script, exactly three points: one each from the conservative wing of his own party, the party's undecided deputies and the nationalists.

The vote failed, 122 to 129.

The script tells the rest of the story with unusual precision. The liberal opposition, the People's Freedom and Justice Party under Frens Ricter, delivered every vote it had to give. The votes that were missing came from the president's own side. The conservative wing of the United Sordland Party, led by Gloria Tory, could have contributed five points and contributed one. The nationalists could have contributed four and contributed one. Gloria had never been won over. The president's attempt to persuade her in the fourth turn had failed, and the script of that meeting includes a clear warning from her: "If you start privatizing health care or state-owned corporations, I doubt I can help you." Two turns later he approved a health privatisation, and the vote-counting script, on opening the session, checks for exactly that before it counts her wing.

Gloria Tory is also the Speaker of the Assembly, and so it falls to her to read the result: "The proposal has 122 ayes and 129 nays. It did not even reach the number of signatures that supported it." Some of the deputies who had signed the petition to open the reform process had, in other words, voted against it, and her own wing was among them. That is the part I still cannot forgive. The president had broken his own rule and paid for votes, and the total he ended up with was smaller than the number of deputies who had put their names to the reform for free. Gloria phrases the sentence as a fact about the president's failure.

Then Ricter rises. His party had voted for the proposal to the last deputy; he blames the president anyway. "I blame the President for this result. He and his party's weak attitude towards real change doomed him from the start." Once he has begun, the game offers the player no reply. The president stands in the chamber and listens until Tarquin Soll himself, who has come to Holsord for the occasion, gets to his feet.

The next morning, Sordland Today writes that "Anton Rayne once again proved himself a sad and ineffectual excuse for a President," and finds a silver lining: no future president is likely to try amending Soll's constitution again.

Two smaller scenes complete the chapter. At the Day of Descension the president must confess to the Archpriest before the televised ceremony. "I confess nothing. I haven't sinned" is not accepted — "Any man sins. We must all come to terms with it" — and the conversation returns to the same question, each refusal vanishing from the menu once used, until only confessions are left to choose; yet the same Archpriest, if the president confesses to hitting his wife, observes that "every man can lose his temper." What is on display is less forgiveness than the power to decide what counts as a sin.

The second is a job interview. Gloria Tory, whose wing has just sunk the reform, comes to put herself forward for the vice presidency, promising more votes "especially if those bills are aligned to my bloc's causes" and pointing out that she would be "the first woman Vice President in the whole continent." When the president chooses someone else, she leaves him with: "I guess you lack the experience to do so."

Listening to the party's grievances, I came to understand what its members mean by unity: no departure from Soll's line. The founder's three arrows — republicanism, nationalism, statism — are still on its logo. Soll himself was eventually voted out as leader by the same party; Alphonso, who spent his presidency in "a continuous struggle to dismantle old USP structures," was removed by a vote of no confidence after his inner circle deserted him; and Rayne, who in the prologue took the gentlest of the routes the game offers for replacing Alphonso, was treated no differently for it. Each of Sordland's last three leaders has been pushed out by the organisation he led, and each, when he finally meets the others, blames them rather than it.

Why Rayne was allowed to rise at all is hinted at over dinner in the third turn, when Walter Tusk, a few glasses in, explains that Alphonso's privatisation "threatened their economic power base," and that the Old Guard "removed him and backed you after." Another guest calls it a conspiracy theory; the narration records only that "everyone went quiet." Ricter, three turns later, will say no more than that Rayne's "candidacy was definitely connected to the Old Guard." Lileas Graf had brought him the conservative vote in 1953, though his campaign had promised "a new constitution and a new age"; perhaps she took the promise for the usual kind. From the start of his term, she later told him from her cell, she and her colleagues "judged you to be a threat to Sordland." A new constitution and a murder investigation were not what they had in mind.

What the player cannot see

Not everything that went wrong in Sordland was hidden, and it is worth separating what the president could not have known from what he simply chose.

Start with the bills. Each bill in Suzerain carries a short description and a bracketed note of its effect on the budget. The Fair Luxury Tax Act, which my president signed when the treasury was empty, is shown as "[+2 Government Budget]." The Alcohol Tax Act, signed at the same time, is shown as "[+1 Government Budget]." The game's bill data records more than that. The luxury tax also lowers the economy score by two and public opinion by two; the alcohol tax lowers the economy by one and opinion by two. The welfare bills he signed — child benefits, disability benefits, workers' rights — cost a point of budget each and raise public opinion, but do not touch the economy at all. So the two measures he took to rescue the finances did more damage to the economy than any other bill he signed, and the screen gave him no way to know it.

The luxury tax deserves a second look, because the game had gone out of its way to show the president what luxury in Sordland meant. At a dinner in the third turn the minister of economy confirms that he has bought a new villa — "a modest house with a swimming pool and a small golf course" — and Walter Tusk, head of the oligarchs' circle, caps it: "My car collection is nearing the forty mark." Two turns later the vice president hosts his new Gentlemen's Club — "No politics. No wives. No one sober!" — in an Erlory mansion that, the development minister Gus Manger explains, he got "for half the asking price" through Gus's network; Gus then offers the president a vineyard, a football club stake or construction shares "not open to the public," as "a simple thank you for supporting me." My president took none of it. Sordland Today reported the evening anyway, under "Petr Vectern Throws Lavish Party," and named him among the guests.

Six turns after the dinner the Assembly sends him a tax on "jewelry, furs, sports cars, yachts, and private planes," and he signs it. The people who would mind were at that dinner, but Suzerain keeps no ledger for the goodwill of the rich, so taxing Tusk's forty cars reduces the aggregate public-opinion score by two — and of every bill in the game's data, it is the only one that costs public support whichever way the president decides. At the next briefing the minister with the golf course reported that some citizens had sued, claiming the taxes violated their "human dignity." In the same turn the Assembly had sent the president a "Human Dignity Bill" to criminalise prostitution; he vetoed it. In Sordland, it seems, human dignity is what protects a man's brandy from taxation and what is invoked to take a woman's last way of earning a living away from her.

The game's store page promises the opposite: "See the impact and result of your actions." The interface shows two numbers, the budget and the president's personal wealth. The figure that actually decides the economic outcome, a score the scripts call "Economy," is never shown. In the ninth turn the game settles the account. It first checks for a debt crisis, with a threshold that depends on the hidden score — a healthy economy can run a deficit to minus seven, a weak one is in crisis at minus two. A crisis adds to a count of late-game crises, and most payoffs from earlier investments are paid only if that count is low. Then comes the verdict: fifteen or more recovers, provided the debt is not high and there have been no more than three late-game crises; seven or more holds steady, with no more than two; anything else is what the newspapers will call the Sordish Great Depression. My president reached the settlement with an economy of about one and three crises; holding steady was closed off before the score was even read.

My president's economy never rose above five. His budget, at the start of each turn, never went below minus six, and for a long time I could not understand why the depression came anyway; it came because the hidden score was low, which made the debt threshold strict, which triggered the crisis, which cancelled the payoffs. Using my turn-nine save, I simulated the settlement step by step and compared the result with the save from the following turn. Ninety-four of the ninety-six economic variables matched — a reconstruction of one save, not a proof for every path, but enough to trust the chain.

The president's record is not a list of principled refusals alone. He paid lobbyists. He signed the two taxes because the treasury was empty. He let the education ministry sell schools to raise funds and, two turns later, approved his health minister's plan to sell off hospital property; he had campaigned on a free market, and it looked like more of the same. Lucian Galade, his chief of staff, warned in that meeting that "people are already lacking proper healthcare even though it is free." He went ahead anyway, with Gloria's warning on the record, and I would do so again: her support had never been his to lose, and a constitution that depended on her goodwill was not going to pass. That was a political judgement, and he owns it.

What nobody could have told him, because the game never shows it, was what the bargain was actually worth. The sale adds two points to the budget if the hidden economy score is five or more, and one point if it is lower. My president's stood at three, so he received one. Beniwoll, for his part, closed the meeting with "Excellent. We can turn that extra money to something useful. I shall let my partners know."

The hidden costs — the bills' effects on the economy score, the price the health sale would fetch, the thresholds that decided the ninth turn — the president could not have anticipated except by consulting a guide or the game's files. His deliberate refusals are another matter, and they were not mistakes at all. He refused to let the oligarch who owns the country's most influential newspaper buy his coverage. He refused to put public money into his predecessor's company. He vetoed every bill that would have widened police powers against the Bludish minority (an ethnic group concentrated in the southern region of Bergia) or narrowed what the press could print. Those choices had costs, and he accepted them. They are what this essay is defending.

Early in the game, Gus Manger offers the president a piece of advice: "Sometimes, people don't know what's best for them until they see it. That's why we're here, to help them see a better future." In context he is talking about economic reform. By the end of my first playthrough it read more like a note from the designers to the player.

The neighbours

Two more of the president's refusals were made abroad. There, as at home, everyone except the president is permitted to be what they are. Agnolia's prime minister, Maartin Van Hoorten, spends the term sending drilling ships around Heljiland, an island Agnolia occupies and the rest of the world recognises as Valgslandian, and governing it through a governor appointed "without holding any local elections"; when a protester tears down the Agnolian flag he is shot, and in the riots that follow more than a hundred die while the government "has still not released a statement." In the sixth turn his party wins re-election "for the second time."

The president met him in Staalport over a trade deal. Protesters lined the road with signs in Sordish — "Sordland Must Pay Its Debts To Agnolia" — and the terms were that Sordland would buy Agnolian steel "for a higher price." With his treasury deep in the red, my president said no. Van Hoorten turned from trade to grievance — "our people believe that we have long been overshadowed by Sordland. I am here to fix that" — offered the old prices in exchange for recognising Heljiland as Agnolian, and, refused again, asked: "Yet we are the ones asking for too much?" A price rise on a neighbour in recession, with a territorial claim as the discount, is a tariff with better manners. And this was the man whose first message to Rayne had praised his party's "stance on just and transparent elections."

The game's encyclopaedia records what happened to the man he replaced: Dijerk dan Otkende built railways and shipyards, kept the peace with Valgsland, and lost office amid "a general perception of weak leadership." The two electorates are written alike. Agnolia's voters punish the leader who built railways and kept the peace, and reward the one who shouts that an island is theirs. Sordland's respond to the same music: in the prologue, the campaign broadcast that cries "Great nation of Sordland!" and calls on the country "to unite under one flag" adds a point of public opinion, while the one that promises "a solid and transparent democracy" adds none. As its scripts count them, Sordland's voters gave a president who kept the peace with every neighbour and tried to rebuild its institutions two points out of seven. In neither country, as the game imagines it, is there a constituency for patience.

Then there is Wehlen, whose president Wiktor Smolak — "severe measures against his political opponents," "strict censorship of the Wehzek press," in his own encyclopaedia entry — walks Rayne through the capital for the cameras, takes two strudels from a street vendor and pays only if Rayne asks or reaches for his own wallet. His price for a trade deal is "Operation Bear Trap," a campaign against the Bludish Freedom Front, and if Sordland will not join it, he will settle for less: "Stop the terrorists from fleeing into your country and you will have your deal. Simple, isn't it?" It asks Sordland to hold its border shut while an army goes through the villages on the other side. My president said no, and Smolak reached for the name everyone in this game reaches for: "I am sure a powerful leader like Soll would've accepted this great offer without a doubt."

The operation went ahead without him; "many Bludish villages were assaulted," and at least a hundred thousand refugees headed for Sordland. The Radical, for once, took his side, in its own fashion: "President Rayne has done well with not even accepting a trade deal with a rogue country like Wehlen. We all know the saying: 'Even a broken clock is right twice a day.'"

The scripts were less ambiguous. Without the Wehlen deal, the refugee crisis takes two points off the hidden economy score if the border stays open and one if it is closed; with it, nothing, plus a bonus to budget and economy. The Staalport refusal had already been charged, in a sixth-turn meeting about conscription that checks for an Agnolian deal and, finding none, subtracts two more. No screen mentions any of it. Together the two refusals cost somewhere between five and eight points, on a scale where seven separates a stagnant economy from a disastrous one.

I want to be precise about the accusation. It is not that doing the decent thing has costs; real politics is full of such trade-offs. It is that the developers wrote both offers as moral tests — the swaggering prime minister, the dictator with a codename — then priced the moral answer in a currency the player is never shown and settled the bill turns later in meetings about something else. A political game need not reveal the exact price; it should give the player a fair chance to recognise the risk and, afterwards, to connect the consequence to its cause. The script applies the Staalport penalty later, in the conscription meeting; in the feedback I received, I could not trace that loss back to Staalport. That is not realism. It is a trap with a moral sign hung over it, and the player is blamed, by the newspapers and by the scoring, for walking into it.

Even Valgsland, the socialist republic with which my president felt real sympathy, answered his alliance with Lespia with punitive tariffs, tied to it in a single line of the game's code, and nobody in the game asks Valgsland to confess. The oligarchs pursue profit, the neighbours pursue advantage, the advocates pursue their causes, and all of this is presented as how the world works. The asymmetry is not that only the president is judged; it is that the player must make the decisions and bear the game's verdict, while the other characters keep the floor to judge him — and he alone is expected to be a saint and a fixer at the same time.

The fall

The Sordish Great Depression is declared in the ninth turn. Public opinion drops by sixteen points at once. Had the president accepted the oligarch's media deal in the second turn, the game's code would have softened the fall to eleven; the reward for keeping the press free is to absorb the full blow. The Radical, whose journalists had been jailed under Soll and who had been left entirely free under Rayne, wrote:

"Either The President lacks the competency of a leader or pleasures himself on the suffering of others. It is inconceivable to assume the latter and a complete disappointment to the former. Whichever way, a new President will replace him in the next election."

This about the president who signed child benefits, workers' rights and the country's first law against domestic violence.

The same turn brought the culmination of the president's anti-corruption investigation. Its findings linked senior figures of the Old Guard — the interior minister, Lileas Graf, and members of the Supreme Court among them — to the assassination of Bernard Circas on inauguration night. The Holsord Post reported this under the headline "President's Wild Conspiracy Theories Validated." The conspiracy had been validated; the paper still called it wild, and described the prospect of the conspirators being jailed as "this tragic turn of events." When the president dismissed the officials involved, the Post called it a purge of "dozens of innocent officials whose only crime was being connected to the Soll administration," and warned of the effects of "our President's catastrophic incompetence." The Radical, which had spent four years attacking him, now greeted his discovery with "We hate to say we told you so, but... we were right all these years!"

Lileas Graf was sentenced to life. The president flew by helicopter to Antel Rock prison to see her, and the conversation was as one-sided as every other in his term.

"You're hanging on by a thread, dear. Time is running out to choose how you want to be remembered."

The game gives her that line only when the president's public support has fallen below a set point — a reading of his poll numbers delivered by a convicted conspirator — and whatever he does next, she has the last word: "I'm sure this isn't the last we'll see of each other."

Soll himself had been following the president around: to the constitutional vote, which the old colonel left his island to attend, and a little later to a men's room at a film premiere, where he explained that "my country was about to make a rash decision," called Rayne a "spineless weasel," and sprayed his cheek with spittle in the course of saying so. In another branch of that scene the script gives him a line that could serve as this essay's epigraph: "You'll find out soon enough how your country repays you for your 'goodness'."

The third meeting is a football derby in Anrica in the final turn, where Soll shares a box with Rayne and Alphonso and informs the president: "I didn't need to build a cult for myself, Mr. Rayne. I built a republic." Later the home stand raises coloured boards forming an enormous portrait of Soll above the words "Welcome Home Colonel," and Soll, watching his own face over the stadium, tells Rayne that the interior minister jailed for conspiring in an MP's murder "is one of the truest Sordish patriots I have ever met." When the crowd grows too excited, he has a diagnosis ready: "That's Mr. Rayne's fault."

It would be comforting to think that the ordinary people of Sordland stood apart from all this. The regional reports say otherwise. Five thousand marched against the government in Narbel, the city where he had walked out of the Gasom gates to meet the workers. By the ninth turn some six thousand "revolters" had declared a cultural centre in Benfi "the headquarters of the revolution," protesters had occupied the Blue Mansion in Lachaven and demanded his resignation, and rioters had set fire to the roof of the Archsanctuary in Deyr — all this for a president who had freed the political prisoners. The scripts explain how. Nationwide unrest is switched on in the second turn, for every player; in the eighth, a report of protests arrives whatever the president has done, and the code asks only whether public support has fallen to minus five, in which case the title gains a word: "Violent Protests in Major Cities." Everything he did is compressed into that one approval score, and nothing in it asks what the crowd is protesting against. The street turned on him as readily as anyone in the Maroon Palace.

I stopped playing my first term in its tenth turn, before the election, but the game had already done most of the counting. In the eighth turn the president's chief of staff, Lucian Galade, brings him a poll. The game's tally stood at two points; anything at seven or below, Lucian tells him, is bad news, and the election itself, counted afresh in the final turn, sets a bar of seven to ten points depending on the route. The game tallies the president's support group by group, and in my save every tally is zero — conservatives, liberals, nationalists, socialists, centrists — except one: "You're set to have the highest share of the Bludish vote of any Sordish president. You're even winning them away from the WPB." Both of the president's election points came from the Bludish minority he had protected for four years. Lucian adds that there are many undecided voters "who don't care who occupies the Maroon Palace as long as the economy is running smoothly," and the economy, by then, was not.

The zeros are worth reading. The script lets liberals reward a president who promoted the market economy, which mine had, but only if the hidden economy score is above five: they share in a success, not in the work of producing one. The socialists count his workers' rights law only if he had also chosen a planned economy in his first week, and his release of political prisoners not at all; what they ask is not what he has done for workers but which side he has declared for. And every route to a centrist point requires an economy above seven. A president who had spent four years trying to hold the middle found that the middle, in Sordland, was not a constituency of moderates. It was a constituency of people waiting to see whether the numbers came good.

By then, this was how Sordland had come to feel to me:

Everyone in Sordland avoids responsibility, everyone blames someone else, and in the end they all agree on one thing: punishing the person who actually took responsibility.

Is this satire?

The strongest reply to everything above is that Suzerain knows. It is not endorsing Sordland; it is portraying a broken country, and the cruelty of the place is the point. The game's own history supports that reading: Sordland is a republic built by a soldier, governed for a generation by his party, and ruined in turn by his successor's privatisations. Perhaps a game about such a place ought to make the player feel what it is like to try to govern it.

I would accept that reply more readily if the game distributed its voice evenly. It does not. The union leader, the Speaker, the opposition leader, the Archpriest, the First Lady, the prisoner and the colonel each receive a sharp, quotable line, and every newspaper in the country has a headline ready for every decision. The president receives a short menu of mild answers, and at the moments that matter — while Ricter blames him for a defeat his own party did not cause, while Graf reads him his poll numbers from her cell — he receives none at all. Suzerain's writers have a real gift for the cutting sentence. They spend it on everyone except the person the player is.

For that satirical reading to persuade me, I would need to see something of the mechanism being mocked. Suzerain hides its mechanism and then holds the player responsible for its output. The newspapers mock the president for an economy whose controlling number he has never been shown; the opposition leader blames him for a defeat in which his own party withheld nothing; the Archpriest insists on a confession whose refusal the game will not process. The target of the satire may be Sordland, but the person on whom it is performed is the player, and that is a different thing from showing us a broken country. It is closer to making us live inside one, with the lights off.

There is a better-established way to put this. The game scholar Ian Bogost has argued that games persuade less through what their characters say than through their rules — what he calls procedural rhetoric. Read that way, Suzerain makes two arguments that do not agree. Its dialogue says Sordland is a cruel and cynical place and invites us to see it from outside. Its rules say something more specific and much less ironic: that refusing a bribe costs public support, that refusing a neighbour's extortion costs economic points, and that a president who takes responsibility for a murder, a recession and a failed reform will be scored on the recession. What they teach is not "look how broken this country is" but "next time, take the helicopter." A game can, of course, satirise an incentive structure by making its players obey it. In my playthrough it did something narrower: it made compliance easier to learn than resistance was to understand.

Is this, then, the triumph of Realpolitik, or a failure of moral nerve on the part of the writers? I do not think it is either. The Realpolitik on offer in Suzerain is an unusually narrow one: voters who look at a single number, a press that is entirely bought or blinkered, a world in which everyone acts on interest alone. Real politics is rarely that tidy; principled leaders do occasionally survive transitions, reforms sometimes pay off within a term, newspapers sometimes do the work of correction. To build the most cynical version of political realism and then let it win is less a victory for realism than the author putting a thumb on the scale. Nor do the writers lack a moral sense. Their Archpriest, their Radical, their Speaker are skewered too precisely for that.

The trouble is that the game wants two things at once. In its dialogue it wants morality: the Archpriest demands a confession, the education minister calls hesitation foolish, the newspapers pass judgement on the president's character. In its scoring it wants Realpolitik: the hidden economy score, the declared camp, the purchased press. Either would be coherent on its own, and in real politics the two coexist all the time. What makes it a double standard here is that the moral verdicts arrive in lines the player cannot answer, the calculation runs on numbers he cannot see, and nothing in the game steps back far enough to let either be examined. The player is the only one in Sordland who is measured by both.

What the game rewards

If principle is punished, what is rewarded? The scripts are fairly clear, and the answer is not what the dialogue would lead you to expect.

The game rewards consistency. In its final economic accounting, a government that privatises the state companies to the hilt and joins the Western bloc, or one that nationalises them and joins the communist bloc, earns bonuses that a government charting a middle course does not. It rewards foresight. Most of the investment payoffs depend on combinations — a railway finished on schedule, a region designated as a trade hub, a matching industrial expansion two turns later — that no screen describes. And it rewards handling: a budget kept above minus five, oligarchs either brought inside the tent or arrested in the seventh turn, and, if possible, a press that has been paid for, since the code treats media control as a cushion against bad news.

Notice what is missing from that list. The settlement that decides whether Sordland recovers does not ask whether it has changed. Economic recovery does not, in itself, require the replacement of Soll's constitution, with its ten-percent threshold and its discriminatory articles, or the protection of an independent press; the code even treats a bought press as a cushion. A Sordland that recovered on those terms would be richer. It would not necessarily be a different country. The economic settlement would register recovery without distinguishing it from institutional renewal.

None of this should have surprised me, because the game had told me in its first chapter. In the prologue, during Rayne's first year at university, a young diplomat named Deivid Wisci — the son of the then president, and later Rayne's foreign minister — gives a lecture. "He explained why Realpolitik is important for a successful foreign policy," the narration says. "He argued that a strategy based on practical and material factors would be much more successful in reaching Sordland's ambitions." The game then asks the player how the young Rayne responded: he "agreed in principle," he "questioned what you were being taught," or his "only concern was passing the exams." I chose to question it. The game did not notice: like the choice of what first attracted him to Monica, the answer leads to the same next line and is never recorded. Suzerain asks the player in its opening pages whether he accepts Realpolitik, does not write down the reply, and then spends the rest of the game grading him by it.

What it does not reward, at least not in any currency that matters at the end of the term, is the kind of government my president actually ran. He combined market reforms with child benefits, a Western alliance with the protection of the Bludish minority, a free press with an anti-corruption police. The game has no category for that. The label it gives his economic course reads a market-versus-state scale that does not register these welfare bills, and on that scale it filed his government under "laissez-faire". His civil-liberties record, every veto of every bill to silence the press or expand the police, does not enter the economic accounts at all. Each part of the system judges him on one axis, and none of them sees the whole.

It would be too simple to say that the game punishes every good deed. The welfare bills raised public opinion; protecting the Bludish minority paid off in the election count. Each system, taken alone, is defensible: an economy that rewards coherent strategy, an electorate that cares about prosperity, a party that values loyalty, a press with interests of its own. The problem is that nothing sits above them. The economic label sees only the market-versus-state scale; the economic score sees trade, investment and debt but not institutions; the party sees only deviation from Soll; the press sees only failure. A president whose virtues are spread across several of these ledgers, and whose failures are concentrated in the one checked in the ninth turn, is judged by that one. The game hands him responsibility, limits what he may say in his defence, hides the consequences that matter, and produces a president answerable for everything and in a position to understand very little of it.

The obvious reply is that a better player would have known all this. Most of my choices were made on instinct — the privatisation included — and instinct, in a game that calls itself political, ought to be a fair way to play: it is how most people bring their convictions to politics. The alternative was to read the guides or the files and learn the thresholds. But a player who had memorised every file would have learned the writers' model of politics, not politics: an economy that is one hidden number, in which a luxury tax subtracts two and a child benefit nothing; voters who are a set of fixed bars, so that a president who meets each camp halfway clears none of them; newspapers in two versions, bought and unbought. To master Suzerain is to understand how Suzerain thinks a transition works, and then to play to that.

There is also the matter of time. Suzerain settles the economy once, in the ninth turn of a single four-year term. Economists who study real transitions argue that the benefits of democratic institutions arrive slowly; one widely cited study estimates that democratising countries end up roughly twenty percent richer per head in the long run, over something like a generation. A game need not follow the literature, but this one sells itself on a populace that "craves democratic reform" amid "a challenging transition to economic liberalization." Scored at the ninth turn, the reformed constitution, the anti-corruption police and the free press cannot enter the accounts, and democracy will tend to look like a poor investment. At the third-turn dinner with the businessmen, my president was given one line in which to say what he believed: "Old men plant trees whose shade they shall never sit under." Tusk had the reply ready — "being a romantic idealist is easy when you have the time and money to just sit down, relax and dream" — and the scoring, it turned out, agreed with him. Sordland's history, as the game tells it, swings between Soll's centralisation and Alphonso's privatisation; its scoring makes it very hard to tell any other story.

Underneath the impatience is a habit of mind the country shares with its scoring. The workers at the gate address the president and no one else; the reports of the ninth turn give us demands for his resignation, not proposals for institutional change. The government once spent a whole meeting on whether schools should teach creationism; Ciara got her way, evolution went into the curriculum, and Lileas later complained about "that evolution nonsense." The same Lileas spoke of "President Soll, God bless him," and the crowd at Anrica needed no textbook to hold up a giant portrait of the colonel who insists he built a republic, not a cult. Sordland could change what its children were taught about creation more easily than it could loosen the colonel's hold on its political imagination. It stakes its fortunes on one man at a time. My president spent his term trying to build the institutions meant to make that unnecessary — a new constitution, an anti-corruption police, a free press, minority rights — and was judged, by his country and by the game alike, as that one man.

Nor is there a door marked "strongman." I checked: the authoritarian path costs a point of economy for each extension of emergency rule, depends on a fragile chain of conditions, and ends in impeachment and life imprisonment if it breaks. Ata Sergey Nowak, the game's director and a co-founder of its studio, has said that the team wanted players to feel what it is like for politicians when the public calls them dictators. What I felt was something else: I could no longer see how to make my principles work within the choices the game gave me, and I could not see that abandoning them would have worked much better.

Taking responsibility is said to be the scarcest quality in politics. Suzerain offers an explanation of why that might be, though not in the way it seems to intend. It does not depict the punishment of responsibility from a distance; it administers it to the player. In my second playthrough I took the helicopter at Gasom, and I did not feel I had become a better player so much as a more careful one. A game that sets out to show why principled politicians are rare had, by its fourth turn, made me a little less of one.

There is a generous reading of that sentence, and I owe it an answer. Perhaps this is the game's real achievement: not to reward principle, but to let the player feel principle wearing away under pressure, which is a deeper political education than any story in which good deeds are repaid. I would accept that reading if the game let me see what was wearing it away. A lesson in how systems grind down conviction would show the grinding — the foreseeable risks of a refusal, a report that connects the later damage to the earlier decision, a chance to answer the people who blame you. Suzerain gives the reflex without the understanding. What I learned in my first term was not why Sordland punishes the person who walks out of the gate, but that next time I should not walk out. That is conditioning, not education. And this essay has never argued that every choice my president made was right; it has argued that the ones he got wrong and the ones he got right were judged by measures he could not see, in voices he was not allowed to answer.

Someone else can be president

What would have made the failure bearable is simple to state. Not a happy ending, and not a country that thanks its president: a fair hearing from people with a conscience, instead of a chorus that plays to the gallery. Nobody is forbidden from being angry in Sordland, and nobody should be. But to answer a president who was plainly trying with "all talk and no action" is not criticism. It is moral blackmail: a demand made of one man by people who never have to meet it themselves. The game would only have had to let the voices that judged him acknowledge what he had actually done, even while condemning what had failed — without a broken clock attached.

I never needed Sordland to love me. My president protected its minorities because rights do not depend on affection; you do not have to love people to recognise that there are things no one may take from them. He kept its press free knowing what it would print about him. He told the truth about the murder of Bernard Circas knowing who would be implicated. None of this required gratitude.

But a game whose voters care about little except a number they are never shown, whose newspapers are bought or blinkered, and whose every voice turns on the president, eventually teaches even a stubborn player the lesson it seems most sure of: that this country is not worth the trouble. If I were allowed to appoint the cabinet that follows mine, I would hand it to the editors of The Radical and let them discover what an empty treasury feels like from the inside.

Sordland got what it worked so hard for. It got rid of me. If there were a next time, I do not think I would govern differently. I am less sure I would run — and a country that teaches its most conscientious people not to run should not be surprised by who is left on the ballot. I have stopped playing; someone else can be president.

A note on method

This essay draws on two playthroughs of the base game — the first stopped in the tenth turn, before the election, the second abandoned in the fourth — and on data extracted from my installed copy: the dialogue database (dated 4 June 2026), the news archive and the bill definitions. Quotations are taken verbatim from that data, and I have only quoted lines that my first playthrough actually reached, unless the text says otherwise. Statements about the game's rules (thresholds, hidden effects, vote counts) come from reading its scripts and checking them against my save files; a step-by-step simulation of the ninth-turn economic settlement reproduced 94 of 96 economic variables in the following save. Where a rule lives in compiled code rather than in data I could read, I have said so or left it out. This is one player's account of two runs, not a survey of every path through the game.

References

Acemoglu, Daron, Suresh Naidu, Pascual Restrepo and James A. Robinson. "Democracy Does Cause Growth." Journal of Political Economy 127, no. 1 (2019): 47–100.
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Chiba, Shu (text), with Daichi Saito and Jini (interview). "Suzerain's Ata Sergey Nowak: 'People Losing Political Agency in Modern Society'." I.N.T., 15 September 2025. https://int-magazine.com/interview/ata-sergey-nowak-of-suzerain/
Dee, Sam. "The Reign of Play: 'Suzerain' and Practicing Politics." Cosmonaut Magazine, 18 October 2024. https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/10/the-reign-of-play-suzerain-and-practicing-politics/
Roth, Christian, Rahmin Bender-Salazar and Breanne Pitt. "Stories and Systems: Educational Interactive Storytelling to Teach Media Literacy and Systemic Thinking." Pedagogy, Culture & Society (2026): 1–24. arXiv:2508.11059.
Torpor Games. Suzerain. 2020; version as installed in 2026. Steam store page, accessed 22 October 2026: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1207650/Suzerain/