The book had many different beginnings, one of those beginnings was looking at how computer games might have popularized computational thinking about politics. That never happened but I ended up reading and interviewing a lot of different game developers. One game has always been important to me, Hidden Agenda that I played as a kind that tries to have you be a new leader of a fictional Latin American country during the Cold War when it was made. The game is less a simulation, then a helix as its developer Jim Gasperini explained to me. The book was an interactive fiction, something that was complex enough to be very difficult to explain.

Against all these efforts to build more and more realistic simulations, Hidden Agenda was one of the ways that I thought we could also imagine a computational politics that allowed us to be more imaginative, more speculative. Or as I say in the chapter,

What are the ways to produce new models and prototypes within the computational imaginary of politics? Mainstream games rarely reflect alternatives. As Jim Gasperini noted when making Hidden Agenda, discussed in the last chapter, "No matter how fantastic the fantasy, no matter how simulated the simulation, the outlines of our familiar reality will always be discernible underneath." Yet some games do provoke other ways of seeing and being. Games have created spaces for imagining politics otherwise like the bleak fascism of Frostpunk or the hopeful Half-Earth Socialism. None of them are so particularly technically complex; they are more examples of procedural rhetoric than radical human machine relations. We can be more ambitious.