Bogost - Obamacare: the Videogame
The problem is this: neither the Obama White House nor the Obama campaign will make such a game. That’s not because the designs are bad; ironically, it’s because they are good. As I’ve argued before, the representation of policy choices and their outcomes is anathema to politics, because the latter is concerned more with politicking than with policy, with campaigning over legislating. This is a different sort of failure to communicate, one rooted in the widespread misconception of politics as a matter of professionals getting, keeping, or losing their jobs, rather than citizens living in (hopefully) better and better communities.
The issue here is that Bogost is conceiving of the “game” of politics as one by which policy deliberations produce policy, and “professionals getting, keeping, or losing their jobs” being a sideline. But the idea of the game is that the latter leads to the former. Politics proceeds under the assumption that the best policy is not evident, and that there can be conflicting but equally valid demands made by different interest groups or value systems. That competition for elected officials to keep their jobs leads to them designing the ones that will most please the public, which should be the best ones.
Of course, that doesn’t always work out in practice. The question, then, is if it is “the worst form of government, except for everything else,” or if there’s something better. What Bogost proposes - what many, many people propose - is that by better educating the public about the best policies, they will want to support the best policies, thus prompting politicians to institute those policies. The problem with this is twofold. First, decades of research have generally found that such educational processes are either ineffective or inefficient. If there’s a lot of information about a new policy, but from both sides, people will just vote based on whatever policy their party supports; people can gain substantive knowledge about a policy, but only by spending several days learning and talking about it, and that’s impossible to replicate both for all people and for all policies. So educating generally doesn’t work. But even if it did, the second problem is that “the best policy” is hardly evident in the way we would like it to be. Such games would not educate so much as serve as another outlet for political argument.
From the information I have about Obama, I’m pretty sure the policies he would have implemented as a benevolent dictator would have been 90% in line with my preferences. If there’s a dissatisfaction with his accomplishments among the wider public, I think it results less from a lack of information than it does from a discomfort with the way he accomplished these things. If you think Obama, as president, should basically be able to institute whatever policies he wants - a lesson many liberals erroneously learned from the Bush administration - then the legislative compromises (Obamacare, the stimulus) and failures (cap and trade, immigration) that have characterized his term have been enormously disappointing. But they’ve also been enormously predictable. I don’t think reasonable expectations for Obama, based on the state of Congress and the opposition party, could have been much higher than what he accomplished.
Which is to say that the education we’d need to impart isn’t about policy; it’s about process. That was what I did with the game I designed for my thesis. It was about designing the federal budget, and the end goal - “winning” the game - wasn’t about designing the best budget. It was designing a budget that would get passed. The point was about the compromises and trade-offs you have to make to actually get policy passed. I thought this would be a good idea because of a concept Bogost himself proposed: procedural rhetoric. Games aren’t necessarily good at simulating experiences - like what it’d be like to not have health care - but they are good at simulating processes and making a certain argument about those processes. And politics is all about process. That’s what I think games are good for. Not necessarily letting us experiences other people’s lives - it’s about helping us experience large-scale, abstract processes that can’t otherwise be experienced at an individual level. Like, for instance, government.
(Source: dropouthangoutspaceout)
