John McCain’s campaign has recently released a new game on its website and as a Facebook application called Pork Invaders – ostensibly as an attempt to reach younger voters through alternative mediums. This game, in many ways, exemplifies the lack of understanding within the McCain camp of how to best utilize the internet as an effective campaign tool. A rip off of the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders, McCain’s campaign switches the eradication of aliens to… you guessed it, pigs and pork barrels. The player, represented by a John McCain sign, shoots “vetoes” at the invading pork, racking up “Tax Dollars.” At the completion of each level the player is rewarded by two pieces of information which contrast Obama and McCain’s spending in Congress, such as the following:

Senator Obama wasted $300 billion of your tax dollars on pork projects; including $93 million in tax breaks for race horses and $250 million for a wealthy company in Montana.

John McCain is against wasteful spending, fought against the pork projects and has $0 in earmarks. As President, John McCain will make the authors and supporters of wasteful projects famous.

Talk about a depressing reward. While these make for provocative comparisons they do little to really peak one’s interest in John McCain and even less in fostering an in depth political debate.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the game is impossible to beat. After completing about four levels, the comparisons repeat themselves until the pigs finally claim victory. Once I discovered this I couldn’t help but think how perfectly appropriate this ending was. As harsh as it may sound, it vividly illustrates the futility of McCain’s attempts to connect with millennials. The Facebook application, released on June 18^th has had only 117 users, 4% of all Facebook users. Likewise, John McCain has a total of 163,253 supporters compared to Barack Obama’s 1,118,358.

Further displaying this misunderstanding of social networking is the McCain’s Facebook application “Campaign Cribs: Straight Talk Express” in which users receive a special tour of the Straight Talk Express given by the man himself … David White? Does the McCain campaign seriously think that it will reach young voters by providing a Facebook application which features the Director of McCain’s advance team giving a tour of McCain’s bus? Predictably, this application hasn’t really caught on either. The application has a total of 16 users – a few of whom probably simply forgot to delete it from their profile after realizing its ridiculousness.

If John McCain’s campaign really wants to reach out to the information generation, it will have to do better than using 1970s arcade games and lame imitations of MTV’s Cribs. What his campaign staff has failed to grasp is that Obama has been able to benefit by using the medium of the internet well, not just using it.

Kyle McLellan

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 4:33 pm and is filed under 2008 Election, Events, Facebook, e-Gov. 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.