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To understand why, we need to comprehend the difference between
politics and politicking. Politicking refers to campaigning, it's the process
we see and hear about throughout the election cycle: the yard signs, the
television ads, the soapboxing, even the debates. Politicking is meant to get smiling faces and simple ideas in front
of voters to appeal to what ails them.
Politics,
if we take the word seriously, refers to the actual executive and legislative
effort that our elected officials partake in to alter and update the rules of
our society. In an ideal representative democracy, the one leads to the other,
but in contemporary society the two are orthogonal.
Ironically, this is exactly where video games would find their
most natural connection to political speech.
When we make video games, we
construct simulated worlds in which different rules apply.
To play games
involves taking on roles in those worlds, making decisions within the
constraints they impose, and then forming judgments about living in them.
Video
games can synthesize the raw materials of civic life and help us pose the
fundamental political question, What
should be the rules by which we live?
Such questions are rarely posed nor
answered seriously in elections. Indeed, the electoral process has become
divorced from the process of establishing and enforcing public policy.
The solution to our medium's failure to engage elections in 2008
is not to wait and try again in 2010 or 2012; indeed, the best solution may be
to abandon the "election game" entirely, in favor of the public
policy game.
What if you could live a mirror life in the evolving world of your
US senator or
city councilor's policy promotions: How would a community benefit from a bond
measure in relation to its actual cost to taxpayers?
What would it feel like to
live under the constraints of a particular fiscal policy? How might an
unorthodox energy policy balance environmental and security concerns? Why will
federal investment in private banking positively impact business and ordinary
citizens?
In other words, the benefit video games can offer public life is
to deemphasize politicking in favor of politics. As the 2008 election fades
into memory, it is here that we should steer our medium's engagement with
politics, whether through official publication by the elected or independent
creation by the electorate.
The role of video games in politics lies here, in
their potential to unseat elections as the unit of popular political currency,
rather than to participate in them directly.
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incidently you never mentioned Democracy and Democracy 2!
That said, one major issue involved in election games that you didn't really address is timing. For Truth Invaders, it took about two and a half weeks from inception to release. That's compared to over a year for the Redistricting Game.
I found that the speed of election cycles and the daily changing news narratives just didn't leave a lot of time for development of novel gameplay or in-depth exploration of issues; heck, even in the two and a half weeks Truth Invaders took, the landscape changed pretty drastically underneath us.
I think one big reason all we see are sound-byte election games is because, under most circumstances, that's all there's time to develop on the fly.
I agree that timing is a major consideration, but I disagree that it's a limiting factor. When we made the Howard Dean game in 2003, we did it in 3 weeks, back to back, and while it's not "political" in the way I've described here (and written about more extensively in my book Persuasive Games), it did offer a usefully sophisticated look into a then-newish concept, grassroots outreach. Many of the non-political games I've been involved in (e.g. newsgames) have likewise been produced in under a month, and they feel more engaged with issues via simulation than the soundbite games. There are myriad examples of experimental development with very limited time constraints (game jams, the experimental gameplay project), some of which produce interesting work (even if not politically interesting work).
A political campaign actually offers a fairly lengthy time horizon, well over a year in most cases, although the time from primary to general election is admittedly shorter. Still, if the consequence of massively reduced relevance is a side-effect of rapid development, then maybe the answer is to leave such matters to blog posts and web video, and focus our political game development efforts on issues with longer time-horizons. Thus my suspicion about the wisdom of pursuing future election games.
It's not as nice to look at, no, but as a game playing through the mechanics of a political campaign it's vastly superior to the Political Machine.
Great article, as always. While making games to pose a question or get people thinking about an issue related to an election (or not), how realistic is it from the perspective of getting people to engage in general? Not everyone goes out on the Web looking for a political game. Sure, they could stumble upon it or get directed there by a friend, ad, whatever, but the obvious motivation for finding and playing a game is entertainment.
To me the challenge is how do you create a game/interaction that feels like a game but ultimately engages the player in the issue at hand? And, at what point do you, the game designer, decide to build the game (so people will play it) versus the teaching/informative tool (so people will come away more informed or at least more engaged with the topic at hand)?
http://www.whirled.com/#games-d_991
You're right that there are many more contemporary election sims, including President Forever. In fact, there were even more (I think four?) on the market in 2004.
@Ken
Nice to see you here. Sure, there's a literacy issue at work, but we might have said the same thing of short video four or five years ago. One way of advancing that literacy is just to have more artifacts out there people can interact with. As for the design question, one answer (an incomplete one, admittedly) is that these games would want to frame themselves differently from commercial entertainment games. I don't think "tricking" people into political participation is what I have in mind.
@D A
Interesting, if slightly bizarre, example, thanks for sharing it.
@Anthony
I was really just advocating an idea, or approach. This idea is not the same as trying to simulate how people will behave under certain policies, but how it would feel to live in a world run by certain policies. The bias doesn't bother me at all, because the games would clearly be constructed from specific perspectives. I tried to do this in 2004, a bit: games that characterize policy positions rather than political personalities.
I would much rather see simulations of a candidate's position than his campaign.
On a side note, those Palin games were getting really annoying.
Run a tight budget or take out loans? Is that clean air policy worth the monthly monetary outlay?
Perhaps Will Wright would take this idea on?
I think not converting that into a political game was a lost opportunity. On that note episodic content seems ideal for these types of events.
Maxis actually created a little-known health policy simulation game called SimHealth, released in 1994. Back in the early 90s Maxis dabbled in what we now call "serious games," including a SimRefinery game for the oil industry.
@Richard
I love text adventures/interactive fiction, and many of the best are very political (A Mind Forever Voyaging comes to mind). I lament the fact that the text game has fallen so far out of favor among the general public.
http://mypakragames.com/games/we-the-decided
the problem is complex social policy and politics don't really translate to game mechanics. simplifying game mechanics to give rewards and punishments for advancement which would be required in games would require that political bias dictate what the gamer is "supposed" to do. in effect you would be making interactive propaganda, not gaming.
game play comes from complex game play evolving from within a simplified environment with simplified rules. you just cannot do this with politics.
I was gonna say... "Any game that has real world politcis in it, I will not buy"
However... Because of this statement:
What would it feel like to live under the constraints of a particular fiscal policy? How might an unorthodox energy policy balance environmental and security concerns? Why will federal investment in private banking positively impact business and ordinary citizens?
I would be interested in. But... It can't be skewed. One glitch in the system could ruin the world... Are you ready for that? Can you live with it?