Author’s Note: This was written the day of the election. Obviously, by Wednesday morning, the sentiments and predictions that it was based on are out of date, and we’re waking up to a whole new world. I’m still doing my usual repost to Medium and leaving the content of the original post as-is. Once again, as in the Reagan era, I find myself out of step with the average American voter. But I also know that it’s always darkest before the dawn.
I wrote about the 2024 U.S. presidential election a few weeks ago and didn’t think I’d do it again. Yet here we are, an Election Day blog. I’ll keep this mercifully brief – and I promise there are a couple of gaming-related thoughts mixed in.
Like the rest of my left-leaning family, I’ve always been politically engaged. I have a dim memory of my mother taking me to a get-together party for all her Democratic friends on the night of the Carter / Reagan election. (Needless to say, the party ended early.)
I attended high school during the Reagan years, feeling out of step with society’s emphasis on jingoism and greed. I breathed a sigh of relief when the backlash began in the late eighties. The first glimmers of a return to sanity were movies that satirized the excesses of the Reagan era, like Wall Street and Robocop. (The corporate villains of those movies seem downright innocent compared to our modern era’s nakedly power-hungry billionaires.)
In those days, I was doing the same thing as many budding developers – building hobby games, often simple text-based affairs, in BASIC and PASCAL and other now-ancient programming languages. One of the first things I remember making was a simple election game.
Elections feel like they should be prime material for game fodder; the entire process is one big game itself. As a topic and theme, elections have it all – drama, personality, strategy, and choices. So why aren’t there more games about elections?
Yet I can think of only one significant modern election game – the latest iteration of Stardock’s long-running Political Machine series. The franchise has been floating around since 2004. (I’d describe the series as “just okay” – not very deep and not worth playing overall.)
And sure, voting and political parties play a role in many grand strategy games, like Stellaris and Victoria. But politics is not the meat of those games – it’s just a side dish.
picture right now, so here’s a bowl
of leftover Halloween candy.
This blog will be posted on the morning of Election Day. If we’re lucky, by the time it’s reposted on Medium on Wednesday, we’ll have the results. But I’m writing this without knowing the outcome of the most consequential election of our lifetimes.
As I mentioned in my previous election rant, I don’t believe our country will slip into outright fascism if Trump wins. If it happens, we’ll find a way to stumble along as a nation for four more years.
But I acknowledge I say that as someone in a highly privileged position. Less fortunate folks – not just here, but around the world – will be hurt, economically ruined, and lose their bodily autonomy or even their lives as a result of the choices we make on November 5. The stakes for so many are real and immediate.
And that’s the answer to the question of why there aren’t more games about elections. We’re all weary of the topic. Talking politics is stressful and sucks the energy out of our lives. We don’t have any desire to play out a fictional version of the latest Trump rally in our free time. (Nor, I know, are we particularly itching to read yet another blog about it!)
Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s sharp Secretary of Transportation, recently met with 25 undecided voters for an open debate about this year’s election. There’s a lot of great discussion in the hour-long video (and a couple of third-party voters who made my head hurt with their tortured logic), but he made one point extremely well.
Biden has not been perfect, but compared to the COVID-wracked chaos of Trump’s term, it’s hard to deny that the last four years have been drama-free. The topic of politics faded into the background, rather than being a constant, draining focus in our lives, plastered all over social media and daily cable news.
Assuming Harris wins, I’m hoping we all put politics on the shelf for a while. After what has seemed like a never-ending election season of disturbing rallies, WTF debate moments, and hate-filled speeches, we all could use a break.
The Scree Games blog, which usually covers topics of interest to game developers and gamers, appears regularly on Tuesdays.