Economy of scale

In 2004, Ian Bogost worked on the first political video game as part of Howard Dean's campaign to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

The video game helped educate supporters on the campaign process. "The Dean campaign was talking about 'get involved, become a supporter', and people didn't know what that meant," he said. So the game walked people through different types of grassroots outreach, with online avatars handing out pamphlets and knocking on doors, trying to reach enough voters before the caucus clock expired.

At the time, Mr Bogost and his team predicted that video games would be the next election trend. "We said in 2008 every major candidate would have a Playstation 3 game," he says, which would allow users to explore the politician's stance on major issues.

But between 2004 and 2008, the landscape changed. Both Facebook and YouTube launched, and it was those social media tools that helped define the 2008 election.

Howard Dean for America: The Game

"It's an easy way to engage a person in something they normally wouldn't be engaged in."

Long before the internet, campaign workers were keeping public point tallies of which volunteers had made the most phone calls and rewarding operatives who registered the most new voters.

But the scale and scope of the internet has made the implications of gamification much more important. "Now we have new tools," says Mr Corbett. "Before, you could maybe get someone to play a game across the city. Now you can get a million people over the course of a few days."

There is also a new type of voter, raised on the fast pace of internet interactions.

"They expect a more rewarding experience, and they expect a more immediate gratification," says Gamification's Gabriel Zichermann. "For them, it's about immediacy and feedback and reward and sociability. All of those things need to be present in a system in order to be interesting to this gamer generation."

Though the full impact of gamification has yet to be seen on the American election process, candidates are working to find the best ways to utilise it.

"We've seen little bits of gamification in previous campaigns," says Mr Zichermann. "We haven't yet seen the one campaign that brings them together.

"I will tell you that the major, expected candidates have all been sniffing around this topic."

Emerging 'crassness'

The idea of earning electoral support with digital badges and virtual points may seem vulgar.

And yet the language of politics overlaps strongly with the language of gaming: candidates compete; delegates are awarded.

The process of gerrymandering, or re-drawing voting districts, is itself something of a game, in which participants try to rig the results in their favour.

Even the colour-coded maps used by the news networks on election night resemble a board game for adults.

But the business of electing a president is no game, and some people worry that the increased interest in gamification speaks to the worst part of American politics.

"There's a continuity within the crassness of elections that gamification plugs into very well," says Ian Bogost, director of the graduate program in digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

"There's a cynicism and instrumentalism to the process that's meant to produce results for its participants, rather than for the citizens."

This isn't the fault of the games themselves, he says. Instead, the focus on high-tech gamification is the expected result of a political culture that places more emphasis on securing votes and "gaming" the system than debating and discussing policy.

But Mr Ruffini says that games cannot obstruct a poor message or lacklustre candidate.

"No matter how strong your social media message is, no matter how many incentives or badges or point you offer, it doesn't matter if your message doesn't resonate with the voters," says Mr Ruffini.

"You can't campaign on games alone."