Quote:And that perception is a lot of what this is all about. But is that perception based on the freedom the game givers you, or the fact that you and the author of the game think within the same 'box'' on these topics. Might I find some game that you feel is relatively unrestricted to be very binding because I think that murder squads, secrete police, and torture are valid ways of running a country and you would never consider them?There actually is a murder squad in the game, LIMPIA, which is based on groups like the Salvadorean Contras and the Colombian Autodefensas. If you choose a miitaristic, rightist path through the game, you can encourage them to make people who you don't like disappear in particularly ugly ways. If you're a centrist, they can be a significant thorn in your side, because the leftists will be constantly harassing you to imprison them, but the right wing of the military will also protect them, and keeping up the pressure can easily result in civil war. If you play to the far left, they end up fleeing the country, and returning to fight against you, possibly with CIA aid if you've pissed off the Americans.
So, no, your freedom of action would not be limited in that particular way. Oppression and murder are tools in your toolbox, and their use has positive and negative consequences, just like foregoing them. But one thing the game is particularly good for is not just representing your character, the president, as a kind of celestial manager, who controls the country from on high. You interact with other 'characters', representing different factions, interest groups and organizations, and make your decision between what the person wants, and what your minister suggests. You pick your ministers, but you don't have autocratic control; you can override their wishes, but you can't just make up whatever you like. So, when you choose the 'death squad' option, you don't just magically command your death squad to do your bidding, but instead give the wink-and-nod to their leader, who then takes matters into his own hands, killing union leaders and other 'subversives'. If you fail to rein them in as a centrist, they kill people anyway, even if you beg and plead with them to stop. You can try to use the army to control them, but you find quite quickly that the rightist colonel is quite sympathetic to their cause. And so on. Similarly tricky, but not trivially symmetrical, problems face left-wing governments.
I suspect the author was at least vaguely sympathetic with a center-left human rights viewpoint, but the game takes seriously the idea that there are a variety of 'successful' ways to run a country, along with a whole lot of unsuccessful ones. I don't think it is a 'fact' that the game adheres to my viewpoint, but does a fairly interesting job of presenting a historical package of viewpoints.
As for similarities to Hammurabi, I never did play that, but the major difference would be that Hidden Agenda uses few numbers. You can look up graphs to see how your country is doing in various ways (usually badly), but you can't ever say "borrow 5 million dollars" or "allocate twenty grain to the army" or anything. So, it's a 'management' game of a sense, but it focuses much more on political choices, rather than technocratic expertise in figuring out and managing a system. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it might detract from the point of this particular game.
-Jester