If you’ve got to be obsessed with something, make sure it isn’t
politics. Sports fans have innumerable events to schedule tailgates
and parties around, and movie fans have festivals and video stores
catering to them in every sizable American town. The political
junkie has one main event every four years, with minor contests
occasionally getting some ink every few months. And every event has
something huge and dire at stake. If the Cubs lose, their fans
might not want to finish their beer and chips. If the GOP loses,
your taxes get hiked.
So it’s about time a video game came along to provide some
risk-free refuge for the political junkie. Simulations of real
world events are turning out to be what video games were made for.
This is a market where the history-of-mankind game Civilization III
is a sensation and The Sims, with 28 million copies sold, is the
biggest blockbuster of all time. It’s with all this in mind that
the Michigan-based developer Stardock is wrapping up production of
The Political Machine, a strategy game where you adopt a potential
president and become his Lee Atwater, James Carville or, God
forbid, Pat Caddell.
“After the 2000 election it became clear that we live in a 50/50
nation,” says designer Brad Wardell, “which creates a great
opportunity to make a video game. Games, by their nature, require
evenly matched sides, and here we had a historical opportunity to
use presidential politics as the backdrop for a strategy game.”
THE POLITICAL MACHINE tries hard to make good on that promise. The
game’s 50-state map (Maryland gets the District of Columbia’s 3
electoral votes) re-creates the biases and moods of the country
right now. New York and California are larded with Democrats, and
Texas and Indiana start off deep red. Virtual Florida cares about
“Social Security” and “deposing Castro,” virtual Illinois cares
about “unions,” virtual Ohio is against “outsourcing of jobs,” and
so on for the rest of the states.
If you take the time to poke through a political almanac, you
find that Stardock has more or less accurately re-created America.
And they’ve cherrypicked the leading political lights of the age —
Kerry, Bush, Edwards, Schwarzenegger — for you to play with. Each
candidate gets to expend his “stamina” crisscrossing the country,
visiting a state (good for a one-point poll bounce), giving a major
speech (the bounce depends on what you say on what issue), buying
an ad (an even bigger bounce, but it drains your war chest), or
shaking hands to build “political capital.” I could trade my
capital in for hatchet men (“spin doctors,” “smear merchants”) or
win endorsements from groups like the ACLU and the NAACP.
I decided to run a test by managing George W. Bush’s campaign.
He comes with a pretty basic arsenal — average charisma,
comeliness, compassion, intelligence, and military experience,
coupled with sky-high stamina, fundraising ability, integrity,
religiosity and credibility. So what if the media hate him and his
minority appeal is at the low end of the 10-point scale? If Karl
Rove could win the White House with this stuff, surely I could,
too.
The game set up a virtual Wesley Clark to run against me. I had
41 weeks to campaign, learning as I went. To my surprise, I won 40
states and ground the general into a sticky paste. Then I ran
against Bill Richardson: 38 states. Jimmy Carter: 36 states. So
much for the Nobel Peace Prize.
This was quickly getting too silly to stand, and I signed off to
re-read the instructions. It’s not that I minded winning. I was
just winning weird combinations of states. George W. Bush was
beating Democrats in Connecticut, Hawaii and Illinois, and getting
hammered in Mississippi and Alabama. And according to the news
ticker that ran across the top of the screen, my opponents were
just humiliating themselves. Why was Jimmy Carter “visiting Rhode
Island to speak out against George W. Bush supporting
Palestinians?”
It was up to the endorsements, Wardell told me. “Many of these
organizations always go one way or the other,” he said. “However,
in theory, these are non-partisan special interest groups. The
endorsements change the candidate’s position on the
issues. So if the NAACP equivalent endorses you, it’s because
you‘ve changed, not them.”
SO THERE WERE TWO types of campaigns I could run. I could be all
things to all people — let’s call it Kerrying — and get endorsed
by every organization until I was firmly in the middle of all
issues. Or I could tack to a hard left or hard right line and win
on my principles. Which of these options would work? Which had more
to do with real American politics?
I opted for principle and decided to re-run the 1992 election on
conservative ideals. George H.W. Bush was my candidate, and Bill
Clinton was the opponent. I moved the economy bar to “recession”
and the global situation to “world peace.” With Connecticut as a
base, I set off giving speeches and buying ads in all the swing
states pronouncing the need for lower taxes, gun rights, NAFTA, and
a ban on abortion.
Clinton responded, of course, by lying. And it worked. I slipped
behind even in Southern states, as Clinton placed “Hollywood
friends” in the Confederacy and bought newspaper ads declaring I
was against “a stronger military” and “American values.” Even
without a Ross Perot in the race (“Anything that is beyond your
control tends to take away from the fun,” said Wardell), Clinton
won pretty easily with a little under 350 electoral votes.
So I tried again, without the niceness. I claimed Clinton wanted
to outsource American jobs, raise taxes, and destroy the
environment. The truth didn’t factor in — even Californians
believed that the Arkansas governor was dead set on polluting their
drinking water and forcing their pregnancies to term. I won in a
squeaker, against a much better candidate.
DID THIS MEAN THE game is accurate? It’s hard to say. The TV age
has definitely made it easier for a moneyed candidate to define his
opponent before the voters get a look at him. The real world George
W. Bush strategy has a lot in common with the campaigns of Gray
Davis: making a spotty, complicated record unimportant by driving
up the challenger’s negatives.
But no matter which candidate I picked, the divide-and-muddle
tactic seemed to work better than sticking to principles. And that
isn’t always how it works in the real world. Real presidents have
been elected by talking straight and arguing that America needed
their leadership to stay strong. Ronald Reagan used those tactics
to sway millions of conflicted voters away from a party that had a
much fuzzier, giving outlook. In the virtual world, this wouldn’t
take.
Attempting to prove my point, I decided to manage the ultimate
muddled candidate. I managed Al Gore. And defeat looked like a real
possibility. After buying a national ad slamming George W. Bush on
“public education,” I had a tenuous grasp on 385 electoral votes.
He shot back by winning the endorsement of the game’s equivalent of
NOW (remember “W stands for Women”?) and the Chamber of Business.
The compassionate conservative had a 279-259 lead. I came out for
tax cuts, eked out a lead, and watched Bush bounce back above 300
with the endorsement of the unions. If you’re a junkie, this stuff
is more exciting than a gunfight.
We battled back and forth for weeks. I nixed Joe Lieberman and
chose John Edwards as a running mate to bog Bush down in the South.
As he campaigned, I hired six smear merchants, six spin doctors,
and a fixer who apparently had the power to murder opposing
political operatives.
Just as Gore closed the campaign with dirty NAACP ads and the
DUI charge, I closed the campaign by sending hatchet men to the big
swing states and promising record tax cuts and a crackdown on
immigration. The South breaks for Al Gore, who is elected president
with 361 electoral votes.
After running a campaign like that, the political junkie in me
settled down considerably. It still hasn’t recovered.
