Augment your President

The United States elections are almost identical to video game pre-order campaigns. A whole lot of time and money is used to fuel a hype train that shows a product/individual in the best light possible, in hopes of being funded/voted for before anyone has any real idea if they’ll actually be satisfied with the product/individual.

In the games industry, the popularity of pre-orders has gradually declined as consumers, video game consumers are wising up to both the great detriment pre-orders bring to games in the industry, and what little they get back from pre-ordering. If pre-ordering keeps loosing steam, eventually games publishers will be forced to make a return on investment via the quality of a game’s gameplay, rather than a games marketing campaign.

But let’s imagine a games industry were pre-ordering is the only means to get a game, and that you can’t play any new game unless you purchased it before release. You’d be investing in a game based entirely on its marketing. You are buying a game based on all of its supposed good aspects, and you will have no idea about that games problems, big or small until it releases.

Let’s also imagine that the only people who give any major insight to a video game’s shortcomings, before release are the marketing teams for rival video game companies, meaning that any and all major criticism of a particular game has to come from a group of people who profit on said game’s failure. Sure their will be smaller critics in the industry, but none of them will have the social recognition, and more importantly the money to change people’s opinions, leaving only the biggest of the big at the industry’s wheel. This, as you might imagine, is not ideal for a healthy games industry. Games companies will make millions before their games have released, and they’ll have no incentive to support a game after its release. Games publishers will put all their focus into the process of glorifying their own product while simultaneously defending against, and/ or rallying against other games with criticisms that may or may not be legitimate.

This would make the video games industry absolute hell for consumers, and would make buying games a risky, shoddy, and frustrating experience. You want to buy a new game, but you don’t know what, exactly you’ll get from that game. This is how the United States presidential elections work.

Millions of dollars are pumped into a single presidential candidate’s campaign and many promises are made, many jabs at an opponent and their policies are made and, depending on who wins, people are either furious or temporarily satisfied with the results until halfway through the elected candidates presidency.

Allot of time and money is being pumped into a marketing campaign, but unlike video games, presidential candidates have an excuse to put everything but the kitchen sink into their marketing campaign. Unless they’ve already served a term, there are no solid ways of truly knowing how a newly elected candidate will run a country. The people that do claim to know a candidate’s shortcomings ,definitively are people who either benefit from that candidate’s failure, or are people that consume media created by people who benefit from said candidates failure.

If only you could take a peek into the future, take a peek into a candidates presidency and know if that president is the right one for you. If only their was a way to play test a presidency, a way to know what your voting for without all of the over-the-top advertising, without the left and right bickering, without the mud slinging, and without the blatant lies.

If only there was a way to test a president’s mettle, policies, and general capability to quickly and logically adapt to adversities in a safe, flexible environment. You already know what I’m implying, this is a gaming blog, after all.

I think the U.S presidential elections would be phenomenally better if we had, not opinions of, but cold hard facts of a presidents capability to run a country. Every presidential candidate should be required to spend time in a clean, basic, virtual environment that simulates the many tasks and challenges a president may face during their time in office involving things like economics, diplomacy, public reputation, and so on. This environment should keep record of how a candidate responds to threats, how fast they respond, how much was spent in that response, and what approaches they take to tackle complicated problems. Every step of the way ,those records, the “score” for this “president play test” should be publicly visible so American citizen could rate a candidate’s intended policies  based on their proven effectiveness, or lack their of *coughcoughwallingoffMexicocoughcough*.

It may sound ridiculous to some more “traditionally thinking individuals”, but I think that the concepts used by video games can change the U.S.A for the better.

If games can’t make America decent, nothing could.