Pure Fantasy
You've heard of fantasy football, fantasy baseball, and so on, where you draft real sportsmen for an imaginary team, then score points to compete with others in your fantasy league based on your draftees' performance in real-world contests.
There is also, apparently, Fantasy Congress, where you draft legislators. Point-scoring is based on your draftees' performance in introducing bills and moving them through hearings, committee votes, floor votes, and so forth. See also MPR's Fantasy Legislature.
This is a perfect illustration of bad game design. It's an entertaining idea ("Hey, wouldn't it be funny if there was a political version of fantasy football?") that just plain falls down because of the convolutions you've got to engage in to contrive a scoring and competition parallel with fantasy sports games. Legislating, for better or worse, is just not very much like sports.
I'm not saying there's not a good game somewhere in the title and concept of "fantasy congress." I'm just saying these guys haven't found it.
Comments
I agree with this guy:
http://blogs.philly.com/blinq/2006/11/fantasy_congres.html
"And it's lifelike: you win by getting bills passed, not by passing good bills."
They've done the same thing with soap operas. (Fantasy SOAPnet) It's a funnier concept (and markedly less depressing), but probably just as miserable a game design.
The HSX, by the way, is a great example of a good way to adapt a non-sports basis event to the "fantasy" concept. You've got a concrete, measurable outcome (box office performance), but they've adapted to market-based play instead of draft-based play, because it makes more sense to this concept.
Here's a horrible thought: Fantasy Game Designer/Fantasy Game Company.
Draft Jonathan Tweet, Reiner Knizia, Monte Cook, Robin Laws. Scoring could be... page count for RPGs? Maybe MSRP for RPG/boardgame companies? Or 20 pts for hardback rulebook, 15 pts for softcover, 10 pts for a splatbook, 5 pts for a scenario, 1 pt for a PDF download.
Or maybe the points are negative and you're just trying to see how long you can stay out of bankruptcy a la "Burn Rate".