Working Title: “Blue Wave”
This game puts the player in the same role that Russia played in the 2016 election: using money and social media to influence the outcome of the election. The player has a pile of money that can be spent on a variety of different election-influencing actions. The verbs are all about what to spend the money on. The special trick to this game is that the player is not allowed to introduce new elements to the campaign; instead, the player can spend money to promote the visibility of stories from different political actors. Those political actors can be politicians, reporters, pundits, or fanatics. They don’t have to be true.
Each day in the thirty day campaign, the player is presented with a list of several dozen stories taken from various actors. The player can select any of these for promotion. In this case, “promotion” is a diplomatic combination of retweeting and Facebook advertising. We don’t specify exactly what happens; we declare only that the money is spent to “promote the story on social media”. The player first declares how much of the daily budget should be spent on promoting the quotation. The player also specifies the target groups to which the story will be promoted. There is a long list of such target groups; the player can select or de-select any of them.
The goal of the game is to help the Democrats win both the House and the Senate. The game does not address individual races; that would require too much detail and too much tedious work on the part of the player (although there is a good game in strategically selecting the races that are close and tilting those races in the Democrat’s favor). Instead, the player focuses on a generic ballot and tries to help the Democratic Party on the national level.
The game will be implemented in JavaScript and hosted on this website. We will launch a GoFundMe campaign with the purpose of obtaining money to use for advertising the game on FaceBook and to increase the bandwidth size on the website if usage grows too high. No money will go into my pocket; any remaining money will be donated to a suitable charity — perhaps the Democratic National Committee? I’ll let the funders decide that issue.
I require two things before making a final committment to this project. First, somebody to handle the money, both going in and going out. Second, a clear demonstration of support in the form of adequate funding via GoFundMe.
August 20th: I have decided not to pursue this project. It depends upon the participation of others, and I have no confidence in the willingness of the community to support this project. I’ve been let down too many times; I don’t want to go off on another doomed mission to save the world.