Hey kids! Want a fun new game that allows you to make moral judgments, while minimizing the depression caused by the presidential primary season here in the United States? “The Alignment Game” gives us a way to judge the moral and personal characteristics of any politician, and have fun at the same time!

To play this game, you place politicians in one of nine possible moral/personal alignments. There are two axes: Lawful through Neutral to Chaotic, and Good through Neutral to Evil, with the following brief definitions (which I stole from this source):

Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit…. People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others.

Lawful characters tell the truth, keep their word, respect authority, honor tradition, and judge those who fall short of their duties. Chaotic characters follow their consciences, resent being told what to do, favor new ideas over tradition, and do what they promise if they feel like it. Someone who is neutral with respect to law and chaos has a normal respect for authority and feels neither a compulsion to obey nor a compulsion to rebel. She is honest but can be tempted into lying or deceiving others.

When you put everything together, you get a grid like this (links go to the DnD Wiki definitions):

Now it’s time to play! (1) Pick a politician, assign him or her to one of these nine alignments, and explain why you assigned them the way you did. (2) The real fun comes when someone else disagrees with you — say, you’re a Barack Obama supporter and you assign Hillary Clinton to the Lawful Neutral alignment, and a Clinton supporter says, “No way is she Neutral, she’s Good!” (3) Reveal your own alignment.

Safe Example: George W. Bush is Lawful Evil. He is clearly Evil because he is willing to take or do whatever he wants without worrying about whether or not he is hurting another human being — and he is clearly Lawful, because his actions must conform closely to his own internal code of conduct. My own alignment is Chaotic Good, thus diametrically opposed to this Lawful Evil person.

Scoring: (1) You get points for creative explanation of why you’ve assigned someone to a given alignment. (2) You also get points for riling up other people. (3) For bonus points, reveal your own alignment.

Scoring for Safe Example above: Two points for explanation (totally ripped off from the System Reference Document for DnD). Zero points for riling up another person (Rush Limbaugh is not a person). Five points for actually following the rules and revealing my own alignment (whereas if I were Lawful Good, I only would have gotten one point for following the rules).

Now it’s your turn! Play The Alignment Game at home, at work, at church, or even in the comments below! Survive the appallingly bad selection of presidential candidates by Having Fun!

Based on an idea from Charlie’s Diary.