I was wondering, since our characters are now legal citizens of the empire, will we be able to vote on issues that the senate try to pass?asked by Idolo

That's a good one, so I thought that would be a good opportunity to have a side conversation with David about politics and how we thought about how it would work, and also how we thought it would affect the Persistent Universe.So, David, will we be able to vote on the bills the senate tries to pass?

Well I don't think you'll be able to vote directly on the bills, but we have talked about the idea that, the characters in the Congress Now Comm-Links and stuff like that are the actual senators who have been elected.Chris: One thing that I want to let everyone know is that I do see it sometimes where people think that some of the fiction is filler on our site, but that's actually not true. 'Cause I've had some people say "I want to know more about how the game's getting made," and that's cool, because we want to tell you about how the game's getting made, but we actually are very deliberately spoon feeding out the world and creating the universe with our fiction.Like we have an update on Tuesday, we have an update on Thursday, we're actually using it as an in-fiction way of revealing things, ideas, concepts, and intentions that we want to have in the universe, and also in some cases player mechanics.So we've had pieces where we talk about the trucker show, then we talk about the mechanics, or piracy. So the idea of some of the pieces is to, in an in-fiction way, highlight what we think some of the game mechanics are.So I would say that it's probably a good idea to read those, even if you feel like it's a lot of text.Anyway, back onto the point.David: Yeah, one of the things we talked about was having elections basically. The senators that you're reading about now have to run for office again. So we would write up these characters for them to run against, do ads, say what is their belief platform, and all those sorts of things, then let the players vote for who they want to have in office.That would be a fun way for the community to throw us a curve ball, 'cause if we write up a character who, internally, we say is going to become a despot if they elect him, and you guys elect him, we have to accommodate for it.Chris: Like live storytelling, right, so one of our goals is that, once the game is live, we want a lot of the player actions to shape how it goes.We've got a general, big, overall plan, which is inspired by the decline and fall of the Roman empire, but there's a lot of directions it can go inside that large framework that we want to have player-fed. So this is a great example where you have the citizens vote on a senator, and then if they vote for a particularly aggressive, militant, senator--David: Right, or isolationist or something else.Chris: It would effect how we would start to update the content after that. And there's other things we're gonna do.So if there's a battle involving two big groups of players, we're essentially gonna have, think of it as a game master who plays a reporter role. We're actually gonna have some people who's jobs are, when the Persistent Universe is live, to go around recording stuff, then we collect news around the universe and if you go into a bar, they'll be playing it:"Off in the Vega sector, the Terran Federation got into a brawl with the Goonwrathi,"and there's a report. So hopefully if you're playing the game, you'll feel like your actions actually start to become part of lore. It's all part of the whole idea of "Death of a Spaceman" where you've actually got a timeline, our spaceships themselves get wear and tear, the characters get wear and tear, time passes, things change in politics, players effect it.That's all part of the spirit of how we think the universe itself will be, a really fun, cool place. And we're kind of excited because, I mean this is a ways away, 'cause we've obviously got a lot of other things to do before we get to this final state where the full game is all fully done, but we're pretty excited about getting to that point and just seeing what happens. Already just what we see evolve on the forums, on the web, is more than we would have guessed. The Alliances, the groups, and all that kind of stuff.David: Right, well it will be kind of fun 'cause for the average player, it blurs the line and makes it difficult to discern what of what is generated by CIG and what we generated by other players.Chris: Yeah, I think it will be great. It's almost like we will be editorial for player generated content. Which in some ways is also what we're doing with The Next Great Starship. That is gonna be user generated content that is editorialized. We say we think this is good enough to go in the game, we help guide it. I think that will be hopefully a lot of fun when we get to do that, but until then, we've still got a bunch of other things to do.