Political World — controlling event-feed spam

✅ Tested in Political World 🧪 Design case study

A political simulation can generate far more internal events than a player can reasonably read.

Political World reached this problem with ideology evolution, summits, and repeated political messages.

The solution was not to stop simulating those systems. It was to separate simulation events from player-facing notifications.

Problem

Repeated events could flood the visible feed:

• ideology evolution messages;
• summit calls;
• summit opened messages;
• summit cancellations;
• repeated vote-related messages.

The player-facing problem was noise, not necessarily the underlying simulation.

Quiet Feed approach

The tested Quiet Feed pass intentionally suppressed several high-frequency categories:

ideology_evolution_*
summit_called
summit_opened
summit_cancelled

Vote notifications remained visible, but with a global cooldown.

Important design choice

There was no deferred notification queue in this pass.

If several suppressed/limited messages happened during the cooldown window, extra messages were simply dropped instead of being stored and dumped later.

That prevents a second failure mode:

solving notification spam by creating delayed notification spam.

Simulation vs presentation

A useful architecture is:

simulation event
    ↓
event data
    ↓
notification policy
    ├─ show now
    ├─ suppress
    ├─ rate-limit
    └─ summarize

The simulation should not require every event to become a UI message.

Pause note

During testing, notifications visible immediately after pausing could be UI/feed tail from events already produced before the pause.

Do not diagnose “simulation still running while paused” from one late notification alone. Confirm whether new events continue to be generated over time.

Future improvement

For a larger system, suppression could evolve into aggregation:

12 ideology changes occurred this year.
3 alliance summits were held.

That preserves information without turning the event feed into a log console.

Scope

This page documents Political World’s own notification design. Exact event identifiers are project-specific.