I recently came across a game entitled “Apathy” designed to spark conversation on some of the issues facing America’s democracy. In the artist’s statement, the game’s creator, Zacqary Adam Green, calls representative democracy the “user interface of America”, and seeks to make apparent some of the frustrations of that user interface by envisioning America’s democratic system as a video game. The game itself is frustrating by design; actions in the game (such as making a call to your Congressperson) have unclear results, the goal of the game, to achieve policy changes, seems to have no motivating force, and the end result of the game changes very little regardless of what strategy the player employs. In short, it is a bad game, but purposefully so.
Green also has an interesting perspective about the idea of games as art, saying that “for a game to truly be art, it needs to make its point not with the aesthetics, but with the game mechanics.” To me, an online videogame critiquing modern democracy is simply an incarnation of the long tradition of artists making political statements through their artistic expression. Right now, I would argue that many people would discount this kind of thing as art, but I think that in the future videogames that are also clearly artistic expressions will gain a higher profile. This has implications when it comes to political discussion on the Internet, given that online games probably have more potential for mass engagement and mobilization than, say, an artistic installation in a gallery.
Finally, the game is a welcome and refreshing take on some of the issues with our democracy. Green asks himself why, in a world where people with minimal resources and equipment can become Youtube stars overnight, we don’t seem to have any of the same kind of efficacy in the political realm. Given that the technological means are there for the vast majority of people to be much more active participants in politics than they are now, why isn’t this participation happening? But more importantly, why aren’t those with the power to do so actively seeking to build systems that facilitate this participation? The obvious answer this is simply that is isn’t in their interest, and the reason it isn’t in their interest is because there are not enough people loudly and openly pointing to the flaws in representative democracy. The flaws, at least to me, are clear and obvious, and action is needed. But Green makes this point much better than I do:
“The point is, our system of representative democracy is a usability nightmare. If the point of democracy is to empower people, we’re doing a terrible job of it. Perhaps our democracy is like Windows — it’s trying to be new and hip, but it’s held back by all this bloated code from the DOS era. Or in our case, from an agrarian society without 300 million people, without the 24-hour news cycle, and without the Internet.”