Could video games help shape elections?

Unlock the US Election Countdown newsletter for free

The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

The shooter creeps along the roof, raises his sniper rifle, and aims at the politician making a speech on the podium. You watch down the gun’s scope as shots ring out and the crowd scatters, screaming. The bullets miss their target. Before being bundled away by his bodyguards, the politician throws his fist in the air defiantly.

Clips such as these, which recreate the attempted assassination of Donald Trump from the shooter’s perspective using video game characters, often overlaying the video with real, harrowing audio from Trump’s rally, swept social media almost immediately following the actual attack on July 13. They were made using free games such as Fortnite and Roblox, where players can create their own worlds and scenarios before sharing them as playable games or as videos on social media. Some clips received millions of views.

In the majority of cases, these user-created games were rapidly taken down by moderators for content violations: you cannot jump into Fortnite today and try your hand at sniping Trump.

The assassination clips were obviously not serious political commentary; though disturbing, they were just dumb memes. In one Roblox version, Trump was represented as a human-sized banana wearing a suit. But they show a new use of gaming technology in political media: games as meme-generating tools.

Thus, politicians are realising that they can reach into game spaces to access valuable younger demographics of potential voters. As Kamala Harris’s PR team realised when they co-opted the Brat green of Charli XCX’s zeitgeist-defining album, politicians appear more in touch when they meet the electorate in spaces where they spend time. Recent US political successes were tied to specific technologies, such as Barack Obama’s Facebook campaigning, Trump’s popularity on Twitter or this year’s Democrat rallies on Zoom with so many attendees that they threatened to crash the platform. Could video games be a key technology that shapes future elections?

So far, Trump has penetrated 2024’s gaming spaces more than Harris. Last month he appeared on a livestream with controversial game streamer Adin Ross, who is banned from the leading streaming platform Twitch and has previously hosted far-right figures such as Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes. On the stream, following a softball interview, Ross gave Trump a gold Rolex watch and a customised Tesla Cybertruck (gifts that could put Trump in excess of legal limits on campaign contributions).

Trump wasn’t there for the gifts but for Ross’s viewership, particularly his engaged fan base of young men. Trump told Ross that he knows young people often vote Democrat, and he’d like to change their minds. For all the tacky pageantry of the event, it was a canny move, attracting more than half a million live viewers.

For her part, Harris has yet to make a significant appearance in games, apart from her image mysteriously appearing as a poster on the wall of the 2019 action game Control (apparently an apolitical accident on the part of developers), and confessing a fondness for Wordle (her starting five-letter word is “Notes”).

Neither presidential candidate has yet drawn on the key appeal of gaming technology — that it is interactive. But it has been done before. In 2008, Obama ran the first in-game political ads. In the run-up to the 2020 election, when the pandemic had forced many events to go digital, Joe Biden’s team built an island on Animal Crossing and another on Fortnite. The latter game asked players to perform mundane challenges including installing solar panels, cleaning industrial waste from a river, and collecting Harris’s missing sneakers. One critic at the time called it “basic and clumsy” and “more depressing than inspiring”. Simply put, the game wasn’t fun, and gamers have high standards when it comes to what constitutes a good time.

That’s not to say there aren’t games relevant to the 2024 election. In the eerily prescient 2016 game Mr President, you play a bodyguard who must get between a Trump-esque presidential candidate and oncoming sniper bullets, while poking fun at topics ranging from sweatshop labour to the US prison system. There’s also The Political Machine, a campaign simulator where you vie for the presidency playing real candidates. Its latest update added Trump’s running mate JD Vance and discussion topics including Biden’s ropey debate performance.

Though niche, these titles show how games can become a lively part of our political media ecosystem. A smart politician would get ahead and carve out their own space in gaming — before it is carved out for them.