Monday, January 07, 2008

Presidential Analogy of the Day: A Game of Risk

Being a fastidious student of the Internet, I have noticed a lot of analogies being made about the presidential election. Recently, over at Slate, Daniel Gross analogizes presidential elections to stocks. This is my little contribution: Democratic candidates as Risk Strategies.

Hillaryland is clearly playing the Eurasian strategy. She is kicking ass right now, with Europe firmly in her control and her armies rolling a swath of destruction through Central Asia. She is incredibly well financed, milking the five extra armies she's getting and cashing in her Risk cards to set up a national campaign to bring home the nomination on Super Tuesday. However, as is often the case, she has overextended herself, and though she is dominating the board, she has too many border territories to defend.

ObamaWorld on the other hand, has clearly staked out a firm spot in South America, making some headway in Africa, nibbling away at Hillary's North African territories, but spending most of his time advancing up north into uncontested North America, a territory where one can dream big, and bring in new voters without having to be too aggressive or spend too many resources in being negative.

Edwardszone, on the other hand, is on the ropes, reduced to Australia, with the Hillary Machine bearing down from Siam; nonetheless Edwardszone gamely attempts to hold onto Indonesia by relying on his solid base of angry, agrarian populism. He doesn't have nearly as many resources as Hillaryland or ObamaWorld, but he is reserving his forces for a big push into Asia once Hillaryland is weakened by her current attacks on ObamaWorld.

The New Hampshire primaries clearly represents all that makes Risk the greatest game of strategic world conquest and most effective means to sever lifelong friendships: the doubleteam. This is clearly represented by Edwardszone current unspoken alliance with ObamaWorld to obliterate Hillaryland by depicting themselves as agents of change while Hillaryland represents the forces of the "Status Quo." Hillaryland, desperate to weaken ObamaWorld, tries to bait Edwardszone to do his dirty work for her -- but it won't work, because Edwardszone knows that if Siam doesn't fall, he'll be spending the rest of his life in East Australia litigating traffic tickets.

Now, does this analogy illuminate anything profound about the Primary? No. But it does allow me to show what happens when you doubleteam someone in Risk: she cries.

4 comments:

Leo said...

Wow, that was awesome.

Scarlet Panda said...

Well said, leo. I clicked here to say the same thing.

mediadumper said...

Awesome squared, you mean.

Kim said...

I like it. Risk is an awesome game.

I beat Brian at it by taking over Europe and expanding into Africa. He only went half heartedly after North America and the guy in South America kept him from getting a continent. His resources were spent on attacking me in Europe instead of strengthing his own position while I played to anger as few people as possible and quietly grow into an unstoppable menace. All he had was Australia which as we all know is fools gold and the place where you go to prolong the inevitable...muahahaha.