This is a good summary of what's been going on in games and campaigning this year. As someone who has been watching/participating in this space for almost 20 years now, I have some thoughts. Unfortunately I am posting them on Twitter dot com, so I guess you gotta scroll down. https://twitter.com/KalhanR/status/1319288544846737414

I wrote this paragraph in 2006 and it was published in 2007, in my book Persuasive Games. "Dean" refers to Howard Dean (remember), for whom @frascafrasca and I made what became the first official game for a U.S. Presidential candidate.

The key idea: I was interested in how games could represent complex systems such as wicked problems and policy proposals to resolve them. What we got instead—even that early—were games as campaign tools. Politicking instead of politics.

That hasn't changed, ever since.

(Incidentally, Gonzalo and I wrote a postmortem analysis of the Dean game in 2008. You can read it here: https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/video-games-go-to-washington-the-story-behind-the-howard-dean-for-iowa-game/. We were so ahead of so many trends, just way too early. We even knew when and why Dean was going to fail a month before they did.)

The campaigning and get-out-the-vote stuff we're seeing this year, in Animal Crossing, on Twitch, and so forth, is an extension of this longstanding trend. It's MTV Rock the Vote but for video games. It's affinity advertising.

And that's totally FINE. But…

It transforms games into "mere" media and publicity venues. Which is, in a way, the fate of the medium. The idea that games could become an alternative form of serious non-fiction representation just never really came to pass. That's kind of the calamity of my whole career lol.

People have been saying "Eventually there will be gamers in the White House and things will change" for literal decades. But you also don't really want "gamers" being represented as a constituency anyway. There aren't "TV voters." These are savvy publicity maneuvers.

The upside is that this year, getting enough people actually to vote (and to have their votes actually counted) really could make a difference, at the federal and local level. So I'm much less cynical about media-centric campaigning of the "get-out-the-vote" sort.

It's cool that @IlhanMN built a swank PC-gaming rig. It's great that @AOC drew 400k+ people to a Twitch stream. People feel more represented by representatives in whom they can see representation.

But we're still just producing images and one-liners about politics.

In a way, Animal Crossing signs and Twitch streams show that pictures and television won. The 20th century won, forever maybe. Games are just places where attention lives, where images get disseminated. Just like I wrote about 15 years ago.