Bill's Passage

Description

Bill’s Passage is a lightweight choice-driven resource management game intended to serve as an educational resource about the process by which bills are passed into law in the United States Federal Government. This game was developed by Benny Mattis in response to the Library of Congress Friends’ Choice Civics Video Game Challenge of 2023. It was inspired in part by a game enthusiast who wished to remain anonymous.

Players play as Bill, who aims to join his predecessors in the halls of history by being passed into law. One of these predecessors offers Bill guidance as he garners the support of elected representatives in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House.

On each play-through, the President and members of Congress are randomly generated with some of the most popular surnames in the United States.

Bill has two years (104 weeks) to get passed in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, and at the President’s desk. On each turn, Bill must decide whether to spend the week garnering support, finding representatives, or being put to a vote. 

The support of individual representatives increases the probability that they will vote for Bill and   increases the probability that they will build support for Bill among their colleagues.

Public support takes longer to get, but it has some influence on the opinions of all representatives at the time of the decisive vote.

Industry support is a kind of “power-up” that will increase the impact of moves to garner the other two types of support.

Bill will get diminishing returns if he garners a single type of support for multiple weeks in a row.

Reference Guide for Assistive Technologies

Due to the display format of games hosted on itch.io, players who rely on keyboard navigation and/or assistive technology are encouraged to play this game  at https://wbmattis2.github.io/bills-passage/.

This game uses ARIA labels to increase accessibility for use with assistive technologies:

• The status section includes current statistics such as:
  • The section labelled resources, which includes:
    • The amount of time remaining (in weeks)
    • The player’s current amount of industrial support (in dollars)
    • The player’s current amount of public support (in percentage points)
  • The section labelled current representative, which includes:
    • The representative currently interacting with Bill (and their current support for Bill)
• The game prompt section includes a textual prompt from the game to which the player is invited to respond. Occasionally, this section will also include links that open in a new tab (target=“_blank”).
• The player responses section includes a collection of buttons, each corresponding to a valid choice that the player might make in response to the current game prompt.

Section content is regularly updated with JavaScript, so these sections have been marked up with aria-live=“polite” for screen readers.

Note on Rights and Permissions

All image assets used are either public domain or licensed under the terms of CC0. This project uses the TypeFic framework, which is licensed by Benny Mattis under the MIT license. 

Bill's Passage by Benny Mattis is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal