Obama is Gaming

Question: What do 360 gamers in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Colorado, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wisconsin have in common if they are playing titles by Electronic Arts online?

Answer: In game advertisements bought by Barack Obama.

With the social networking groups on Obama’s site such as Black Gamers for Obama, is it any surprise. Further, back in September, there was a virtual election on XBOX Live and, as reported on Digital Spy UK, virtual voters backed Obama.

Now that the election is coming to ahead, and the candidates are focusing on battle ground states, this is an unprecedented move by Obama.  Now, I don’t think that this is as big as the first time a presidential candidate spoke on radio or appeared on TV in terms of milestones of the political process.  But when we look at the bigger picture, the use of the internet and web 2.0 technology, to me that includes online video games due to their social networking aspect, this is a huge move. It means that Obama has officially found a way to permeate every Social Media and Web 2.0 technology… and that is pretty damn cool. The results are evident as we see more and more young people and hard to reach demographics more engaged in the political process than we have in the past.

My prediction for the future of games and politics: if this proves to work well in terms of reaching potential voters and it is received well, the next time there is a big election there will even be candidate video games. Now what would those be?  Maybe online quiz games on policy?

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