In October 2004 we held an event that looked at Independently-Produced Web Videos in the 2004 Campaign. As part of the event, we asked our graduate research assistants to watch as many political web videos as possible.

We watched a lot of snarky videos and animations. But some of the most interesting tings we interacted with weren’t videos: they were the politically-themed games, like The Howard Dean for Iowa Game.

We didn’t know what to do with them.

They didn’t quite fall into the category we were researching. Watching a video, however humorous or inflammatory, simply is not as engaging as playing a game, such as pretending to be Tom Delay chasing after bags of money, to use a more recent example. (Delay’s Dollars, designed by Blackrock Associates won a 2007 Golden Dot Award for best Animation or Mashup.)

They were, in a word, irresistible: hard to put down and hard to forget. The image of Tom Delay bobbing across a screen, saying “Money, my money,” every time he grabs a bag of money was a joke around our offices for a week.

Politically-themed games aren’t a pleasant way to obtain a few giggles. Because they ask users to engage in a scenario – whether that scenario is running a grassroots campaign or grabbing bags of cash – games have the ability to establish and reinforce political themes and teach political strategy.

Ian Bogost, founding partner of Persuasive Games (which designed the Dean for Iowa Game, amongst dozens of others over the past several years) and author of a new book called Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames believes that video games immerse players in a virtual world of political rhetoric and expression:

Videogames are particularly useful tools for visualizing the logics that make up a worldview . . . The politics of [Hurricane] Katrina and counter-terrorism only become apparent thought the unusual conditions that expose their underlying logics; such situations are rare in everyday practice – and perhaps ideally avoided. . . . Political videogames use procedural rhetorics to expose how political structures operate, or how they fail to operate, or how they could or should operate. Videogames that engage political topics codify the logic of a political system through procedural representation. . . .

If policy issues are complex systems that recombine and interrelate with one an other according to smaller rules of interaction, then videogames afford a new perspective on political issues, since they are especially effective at representing complex systems.

In other words, games have the ability to immerse players in the political process – from running grassroots get-out-the-vote activities to addressing policy issues to confronting political issues, such as gerrymandering (See our post on The Redistricting Game). They are interactive parables that have the potential to engage users in a way that today’s Sunday morning political programs simply or grainy, awful, 20-minute YouTube footage of a candidate’s stump speech in Iowa do not.

Games, when created in the right way, have the potential to do what even they most well-designed political ad cannot: engage, immerse, and guide people through a policy decisions, political action (donating, grassroots organizing, persuading neighbors), and possibly even a candidate’ life story.

(And we’re not just talk about kids. Some of the most avid players of casual games happen to be middle-aged women.)

We’d like to predict that by the beginning of the primaries, at least one of the candidates will develop a game that looks at one of his or her policy issues. It would, at the very least, give us something to talk about at our 2008 Politics Online Conference on March 4^th and 5^th.

But politics can be a slow-moving animal. So we might see a fantastic game emerge from the 2008 campaigns. Or we might have to wait.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 10:39 am and is filed under 2008 Election, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.