There’s a new game up on the official John McCain campaign page. Players can copy and paste a pre-written response into a selection of blogs across the political spectrum, and in doing so, earn “points.”

I’m not here to take sides in the upcoming 2008 election. This is Kwanzoo, after all! We may ask you what song John McCain referenced when he joked about bombing Iran, but it will be strictly for trivia purposes.

No, we’re here to analyze the game mechanics of this exciting new innovation in campaign entertainment. Though clever, the McCain game has several flaws.

First, the game requires independent verification by campaign staff that you have successfully copied and pasted the day’s talking points into DailyKos or wherever. If not automated, this would be a serious drain on campaign resources as volunteers chase links on the web. I would suggest some kind of automated spider to crawl blogs and match the premade posts to email addresses, thus awarding points automatically. (Perhaps it could even be modified to post automatically, if successful? This would eliminate the need for users to copy and paste and speed the process greatly.)

Secondly, there appears to be no real reward for earning these points. It’s just points for points sake. This betrays a serious understanding in why people play games in the first place.

Games can be intrinsically fun, like the old arcade games that were some of the last specimens to simply have points for points sake, tracking a player’s progress against his peers and his previous best. But in cases where the activity is mind-numbingly dull, like the McCain game or MMOs, further incentive is needed. Perhaps users could deck out a little virtual avatar in virtual campaign gear with their points?

Another idea would be to implement an Xbox Live-like system of achievements, where players earn different virtual badges for things like posting in blogs on both ends the political spectrum, posting five times on Little Green Footballs without being banned, etc.

Or perhaps players could be entered in a weekly sweepstakes. It’s just a thought.

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Categories: Video games //