by Dennis McCauley

Editor

Last week, an environmentalist protesting the expansion of Heathrow Airport threw a cup of green custard at British Business Secretary Lord Mandelson outside the Royal Society in London.

The protester, Leila Dean, 29, has been arrested by Scotland Yard over the incident.

T-Enterprise has now posted an online game lampooning the Mandelson sliming. Players toss custard at Lord Mandelson to score points. Hitting former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, however, may earn the player a punch in the nose. Prescott once slugged a protester who threw an egg at him.

At Water Cooler Games, Prof. Ian Bogost writes that the Politics Online Conference is accepting votes for 2008's best online political game.

Unfortunately, only two choices are offered: Bush Move In Day and Dress Like Palin. Both were publications of the California Nurses Association.

Bogost comments:

Neither of them are games; they're both little drag and drop toys that give more detailed information about what could have been done with Palin's clothing budget, or about the residue of Bush policy after his departure from office. It's disappointing to see that this is the cream of the crop among online political games this year.

GP: It's unclear why only two games from the same non-profit are on the ballot. Perhaps organizations needed to nominate themselves but didn't get the word. GamePolitics, however, reported on dozens of political games in 2008. These included commercial and amateur offerings distributed both online as well as on DVD.

Although GamePolitics tracked numerous election-themed games during the presidential campaign, we just stumbled across one of more unique and interesting ones.

Steal This Election is slick look at how to use dirty tricks to win the White House. The game has more attitude and atmosphere than most of the other offerings we've seen, which are generally variations on martial arts, FPS or whack-a-mole.

Our only gripe is that the online game is broken. GP's candidate (a Sarah Palin knockoff) won with 182% of the vote. Also, there doesn't seem to be much replayability. No matter which candidate you choose, the dirty tricks are the same. It made sense in the game for my Palinesque character to paint Obama as a terrorist, since that was, unfortunately, an actual theme in the election. It made less sense to have the same tactic available for the Obama-like character to use against the game's faux McCain.

Despite these rather significant flaws, Steal This Election is worth a look if political games float your boat. Let's hope that they fix the game mechanics by the time November, 2012 rolls around.

GP: Okay, that's it. No more election games. Probably...

Gene Koo of Valuable Games live-blogs an appearance by serious games guru Ian Bogost (left) at a Harvard study group led by Nicco Mele:

Video games [serve] as a centrifying values issue, making it very cheap [for politicians] to decry video games. Ian mentions the ECA (Entertainment Consumers Association), and the idea of a union of video game players, or a common identity among gamers, “weirds” him out.

Gamer demographics — if there are political games, whom will they reach?: There’s a lot of bad data, but… see the Entertainment Software Association. The better question is to break them down by style/type. Ian’s own games — TSA game since 2006 has approached 50M plays. (< $10K to build).

An Obama game could really sell. Who wouldn’t buy an Obama game? Well...

So what about an abortion game that attempts to help each side understand the perspective of the other side of the debate? ...

Nicco mentions that the [Howard] Dean [2004] campaign’s game did inspire people to donate, get involved. Ian wonders if this idea will “peak” (novelty factor).

The problem is that the vast majority of these [political] games are meaningless tripe. See Ian’s discussion of Pork Invaders, in the Gamasutra article, and also the contrast with Tax Invaders as a rhetorical device.

FULL DISCLOSURE DEPT: The ECA is the parent company of GamePolitics.

GamePolitics covered so many election-themed Flash games during the run-up to November 4th that we actually lost count.

Surprisingly, however, a roundup on Amazon.com's Game Room Blog turns up a few that we missed. For the sake of completeness, here they are, along with Amazon's description:

• Joe The Plumber: Layin' Pipe  ...use your brainteasing abilities to beat the flush in this escalating series of puzzles that are reminiscent of the hacking mini-games of BioShock.
• Below The Beltway  ...this boxing game [featuring the red and blue tickets]... pulls no punches.
• Campaign: General Election Edition ...A turn-based strategy game where players choose their candidate and support staff members--each with different strengths, weaknesses and special moves... Singleplayer and multiplayer...
• AirMILF ...Thanks for the memories Governor [Palin]
   

If the Obama honeymoon isn't over for you yet, check out Super Obama World.

For now you can play an Alaska level or head to the Republican National Convention. But more levels are promised, including Illinois, Arizona and Washington, D.C.

If you like the very 8-bit looking online platformer, they've got merch you can buy as well.

Via: Kotaku

In his Gamasutra column, Georgia Tech prof Ian Bogost writes of the decline of the officially-sponsored campaign video game:

The 2004 election cycle saw the birth and quick rise of the official political video game... It was easy to get public attention around such work, and indeed one of the benefits of campaign games revolved around their press-worthiness. By the final weeks of the last election cycle, all signals suggested that campaign games were here to stay.

But, as Bogost notes, only the McCain campaign's dreary Pork Invaders emerged in the 2008 presidential election season. There were, however, a plethora of unofficial games, as tracked by GamePolitics. Bogost, who has designed political games himself, does not regard them highly:

Unofficial political games also made few innovations this year. The largest crop of them are game-like gags about Sarah Palin, from the almost-topical Polar Palin to the toy-like Palin as President to the wildlife sendup Hunting with Palin to a series of Palin chatterbots to the inevitable whack-a-mole clone Puck Palin.

We'll have to take issue with Bogost's head count of commercial games with political themes. While he does mention The Political Machine 2008 and the very forgettable Hail to the Chimp, he seems to miss Democracy and President Forever.

If politically themed games are indeed dwindling, why is that happening? Bogost suggests that campaigns are turning to other online resources:

There are reasons games have grown slowly compared to other technologies for political outreach. The most important one is also the most obvious: since 2004, online video and social networks have become the big thing, as blogs were four years ago...

 

Online video became the political totem of 2008, from James Kotecki's dorm room interviews to CNN's YouTube debates. At the same time, the massive growth in social network subscriptions made social connectivity a secondary focus for campaign innovation, especially since Facebook opened its pages beyond the campus in 2006.

GamePolitics readers may recall ICED!, an immigration-themed game released earlier this year by human rights organization Breakthrough. ICED! generated a good bit of controversy, including attacks by the Minutemen anti-immigration group.

While the goal of ICED! was to avoid being picked up by the authorities, Breakthrough has launched a new game which explores issues surrounding federal detention of suspected illegal immigrants.

Homeland Guantanamos is an interactive, online adventure which casts the player in the role of an investigative reporter looking into conditions inside federal immigrant detention facilities. As the game begins, players are assigned to follow up on the death of Guinean tailor Boubacar Bah, a real person who died under mysterious circumstances while being held at a facility in New Jersey. 86 other suspected illegal immigrants have also died in U.S. custody since 2003.

The New York Times, which originally broke the story of Bah's death, looks at the Homeland Guantanamos:

The fictional framework plays fast and loose with traditional rules of journalism — the reporter takes an undercover job as a detention guard and writes a first-person appeal for change rather than an article — but the content encountered along the way is backed by links to real newspaper articles, court documents and other factual material...

 

Mixing fact and fantasy is familiar territory for Breakthrough, which seeks to galvanize young people by using the new tools of popular culture to put them in the shoes of legal and illegal immigrants.

Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security offered harsh criticism of the game:

[It is] a work of fiction that dehumanizes the individuals depicted and grossly distorts conditions in detention facilities. I believe that most informed people know that they leave reality at the door when they enter the world of video games.

Breakthrough executive director Mallika Dutt, who hopes the game will help generate support for legislation aimed at bringing additional due process to immigration proceedings, told the NYT:

The Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement measures have become increasingly draconian and are leading to severe consequences, including death, for many.

Earlier this month British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spotlighted the topic of food waste in the U.K., which he said costs the average household about £8 ($16). Brown's comments, which included criticisms of "buy one, get one free" promotions run by supermarkets, sparked some derision in the UK.

Via the Wasted Food blog, we've learned of an online parody game, Gordon Brown and the Kingdom of the Wasters:

You get to control the British Prime Minister as he tries to recover good food like bananas and cupcakes while avoiding rotten items like fish bones.

 

Apparently, dastardly opposition leader David Cameron is the one throwing away the good food. The goal is to catch Cameron and stop him from giving another press conference. Zelda, it’s not.

CNN's Political Ticker is reporting that the McCain campaign has launched a new game app on Facebook.

The game is called Pork Invaders. In order to succeed, players must avoid being hit by projectiles (pork-jectiles?) launched by flying pigs. From the CNN piece:

How do you kill the flying pigs? By shooting off vetoes. With each pig killed by a veto, users rack up millions of tax dollars as their score, and progress to the next level — but only after the game lays out campaign talking points like comparing the respective records of Sen. McCain and his rival, Sen. Barack Obama, on earmarks...

  

McCain currently has approximately 150,000 supporters on Facebook while Obama now has roughly 1,020,000 supporters on the site.

Students in Denmark will soon have an opportunity to explore the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict thanks to a new PC game.

Reuters reports that Global Conflicts: Palestine puts players into the role of a journalist on assignment in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

In order to gather their story, players can interview civilians, soldiers and militants. When they've finished collecting information, players write an article on the conflict and receive a grade, determined by the game

Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, one of the game's designers, spoke to Reuters about the project:
 

The goal for them is to recognize there are different perspectives, that the story can be also be told in different perspectives...