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On October 28th, the Harris-Walz campaign released a custom map on Fortnite called Freedom Town, USA, which contains a sprawling city, places to fight, and Harris-Walz advertising on most of the buildings. This was done by the Harris-Walz campaign to influence younger voters aged 18-25 to vote, and while this is a bold move by the campaign to hopefully gain new voters, does it really help?
Campaigning in video games has long been a thing used by presidential candidates, but these are usually just done by individuals, not a part of the official campaign itself. This is done in part to encourage gamers, who are usually relatively young, to vote. Only recently has the impact of video games being a hub for political advertising been used to the fullest.
In 2008, the Barack Obama campaign was the first presidential campaign to dabble with advertising in video games. Julius van de Laar, who campaigned for Obama in 2008, said that “we were so well funded in the 2008 election campaign that we had the financial freedom and capacity to simply try things like that.” The first few examples of this were in NBA Live 08 and Burnout Paradise, a racing game.
In 2012, a game called “Vote!!!” came from Epic Games’ Chair Entertainment. The game featured Barack Obama and Mitt Romney fighting each other with a plethora of weapons, from a microphone to a red-white-and-blue popsicle.
While obviously a very silly premise, the game actually had a very interesting feature. The game could see how much time a player would dedicate to playing as one candidate, then, depending on which candidate took up the most of the player’s time, the game would determine which candidate the player would “vote” for. This is obviously not a real simulation of how the election went, but by the time the 2012 election had begun, the game had simulated that Obama would win the election. And as we saw, Obama won that year.
In 2016, there really wasn’t much in the way of political games from either candidate, since both detested the impact video games had on people, and both saw video games as a cause of violence. While there were a few individuals that did some campaigning in games like Minecraft, the candidates and their campaigns were adamant about video games not being attributed to them in any way.
2020 was a turning point in the way we view video games and politics. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, people were kept inside for the entire year, forcing campaigners to find new ways to campaign outside of lawn signs and other outdoor forms of campaigning. One of the most interesting and most popular forms of this was when the Biden-Harris campaign flocked to the then brand new game called Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Animal Crossing was one of the biggest games of 2020, and as a result, the Biden-Harris campaign set its sights on influencing people to vote from the comfort of their homes. The campaign made its own custom island, fit with Joe Biden’s office and his plans for the presidency. Christian Tom, digital campaigner for the Biden-Harris campaign, says that “exploring is at the heart of Animal Crossing, and we know that Biden HQ will encourage players to explore all the ways they can make a plan to vote at IWillVote.com and help elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.” The Trump-Pence campaign made it known that they didn’t want any part of it, as Samantha Zager said this about Biden’s Animal Crossing campaign: “This explains everything: Joe Biden thinks he’s campaigning for President of Animal Crossing from his basement. The Trump campaign will continue to spend its resources campaigning in the real world with real Americans.”
And this year, the Harris-Walz campaign made it clear that videogames are one of the core things that they plan to use to reach younger audiences. In this last week alone, we’ve seen Tim Walz go live on Twitch with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to play Crazy Taxi, a game on the Sega Dreamcast that Walz himself said was one of his favorite games. We also saw them play Madden 25, a recently released football game. As well as vice president gaming, we also saw the aforementioned map in Fortnite dedicated to the Harris-Walz presidency. And unlike the previous two elections, it seems the Trump campaign is reluctantly following the trend. In August, Trump met up with controversial Kick streamer Adin Ross, where he spoke about immigration and the economy.
It is very interesting to see how both campaigns will try to reach gamers as we close in on the election. Seeing as how the Fortnite map was just released just a 2 days ago as of the publishing of this article, it doesn’t seem like it will slow down.
