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Dissected: Developing an Election Game
Posted by Hsing Wei on 04-21-08Given the competitive Hillary/Obama primary battle, it’s timely to read lessons learned in developing The Howard Dean for Iowa Game. How can video games be designed to convey political messages? Crafted to be received by the public as consequential vs. trivial? Integrated with the rest of a campaign? An online article reviews the design and production process behind the game concieved with campaign strategists just before the important primary season.
The Dean campaign commmissioned the game to teach “on the fence” constituents about the power of grassroots outreach and move them towards more material support. In a series of minigames, players conducted “virtual outreach” to win over Iowans. Coordinated with real world events, the game ended during the Iowa Caucas and players saw how many virtual supporters they had recruited by that time. Similarly, the game was hooked in to the rest of the Dean Campaign’s online initatives— links to candidate info, channels for contributions, and additional resources.
Highlights of the developers’ reflections:
- There are temporal challenges in creating games subject to the pace of business and social contexts. The Dean game’s development was compressed into 4 weeks so that it could be in the hands of potential supporters far enough in advance for them to play, reflect, and take action. Such a roll out schedule constrained the quantity and quality of representation possible in the game.
- Game concepts and design benefit from gathering a firm understanding of campaign needs and target constitutents. Scaling down representation of grassroots outreach to concrete activities (sign waving, door to door canvassing, and pamphlettering) reflected an awareness that fence-sitters needed to understand what “involvement” really meant. However, letter writing may have been a better choice of activity represented since that was the main method the Dean campaign invoked in the real world to get national supporters involved without traveling to Iowa.
- To inspire players to action, it is crucial to create a link between game representations and the material world. In the game design process, there was a deliberate attempt to create Identification. The visual type of characters and environment chosen were selected to stimulate affinity in the player. Also accounting for game developers’ own biases, simple generators pulled from census data demographic distributions and baby names to create a true variety of backgrounds.
- Dynamics were designed to encourage players to consider outlets for real world interaction. Instead of “email this game to a friend”, an IM based recruitment feature incentivized players to muster their personal network in the material world. Players had an incentive, received “free points”, if an IM user was online and received a message sent through the game server—thus privilaging real world connections recruited over virtual ones.
- Game mechanics associated with violence in some games can be used for community building in another.
- Publicity on traditional media outlets is still useful in driving traffic vs. relying solely on grassroots blogs. Games can also convey meta-messages not designed in the game itself (e.g. that the candidate is pioneering) that makes games instantly news worthy.
Any statements suggesting that a game can change the outcome of an election are likely overambitious. But it does seem that games can have a legitimate and important part in the ecology of future election media and messages.
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