The always interesting Watercoolergames.org has posted a little story about Boot the Bigot, a whack-a-mole-type Flash game created by the Human Rights Campaign. The target of this simple satircal exercise is Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who, according to Watercooler, 'has recently been derided for his public statements against homosexuality and sexual privacy'. Although to be fair, he does have an excellent name - perhaps more befitting of a professional wrestler or hard-nosed private eye. Later in the post, Ian Bogost complains,
"It's too bad that legislators and policy organizations continue to believe that games have so little potential to represent actual political processes."
That's as true in the UK as it is in the States - as far as I can remember (that's my way of saying 'the following statement could well be riddled with inaccuracies') the last example of a political party attempting to engage the British electorate 'through computers' was a Liberal Party mobile application that let you re-assign the government's five billion Iraq War spend in other areas such as health and education. Elsewhere, you may have read about, the interesting Cyber-Budget game commissioned by French budget minister, Jean-François Copé, to teach his countrymen a difficult lesson about balancing the books.
More commonly, games are used as a means of political or anti-corporate protest - Watercoolergames.org's huge list of political games is jammed with hit-and-miss examples.
With the Labour party currently unable to engage with the public via traditional media, you'd think they'd be jumping at the chance to find new channels of indoctrination discourse. In all honesty, how can we be expected to understand the troubles John Reid is going through until they are presented to us in the form of 'Sim Home Office'?
