This TapScape piece is about 519 Games’ Campaign Story and trends in how players choose to play in the election narrative. I’m don’t think I fully buy into the idea that the game trends predicted the actual election, even if Campaign Story did call it for Obama a few weeks ago, but the I think analytics raise interesting points about how we engage games and the roles we take on in games.
While it’s not hard to look at election news coverage and find pundits pointing to tiny blips in the statistics to prove pet theories, some interesting stats are revealed.
First, in Campaign Story, Conservative player-candidates are outspending their Liberal counterparts by near three times as much. Really interesting observation, although it’s hard to know whether this means that these players are offline conservatives as well, or that players indulging in escapist, game-playing fantasy, tend towards the narrative of a well-funded, high-rolling conservative campaign. After all, a scrappy, always-broke, grassroots campaign isn’t necessarily the escapist narrative players are looking for in a workday break.
This piece on Yahoo! is actual Election Day coverage, as much as noticing campaign signs in a battleground state in hotly contested election can really be considered reporting. I did get shooed away from taking further pictures at a polling place, which made me feel like a tough investigative journalist. Using my phone camera, with my readership spiraling upwards into the dozens…
It’s very odd to see Meg Stivison – Chapel Hill, NC as the byline. North Carolina didn’t actually support Obama (although the county in which I found these signs and wrote the story did), which isn’t entirely bad for me, because in a fit of election night nerves, I’d rashly promised to stop saying awful things about the state if it went blue. And you know how hard that would be?
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