Response 16

The article about Howard Dean and video games in Washington by Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, discusses the fact that Howard Dean failed in his bid to become 2004 Democratic U.S. presidential candidate, however, still being successful in changing that way political campaigns are carried out. The article also goes into detail about how Howard Dean was the first candidate to “use a video game as endorsed political speech”. The article first starts off with a brief introduction followed by a section called virtual campaigning. “The intention of the game was to teach current and potential constituents about the power of grassroots outreach”. The game had a few obstacles that had to be overcome. One of these obstacles that the article gets into is development time. The game was released around Christmas 2003 and began production just three weeks before hand. Since there was so little time, the development team decided to break the game up into two parts and would be made parallel to each other. One part was the grassroots simulation and the other was half was working on the outreach activities. The next section of the article discusses what type of people would be playing the game and how they can incorporate diversity in their game. The developers wanted to also reach people of all ages, not just people who viewed Howard Dean as someone who appealed to younger audiences. Demographics were important in the process of performing the grassroots outreach. Developers needed to find ways to represent player’s age and name on the screen. They came up a simple solution that displayed all their primary information next to their marker instead of creating custom avatars for each player. The next section of the article is titled endorsed game-based political speech. This section argues that all games are in some sense political. Developers of these games are trying to convey some message across to the player. The next section of this article explains no matter what, the association of video games and politics attracts media attention. The article wraps up with a section on achieving early and often.

I found this article to be a good read on how a political game was thought of and produced. I found it interesting and cleaver that Howard Dean thought up of this new way to reach supporters of his campaign by making this game. However, if he was in fact trying to reach an older audience I do not believe making a game was the right move because the media often characterizes games as for young children and teenagers. Games however, are being more accepted and this attempt to design a game like this was certainly a good effort in trying to do this. I fear that the people who vied him as a candidate who appealed to younger audiences could use this game as more evidence of their argument. I think that video games have some good potential for political campaigns around the world as technology for it improves.