Cast Your Vote (CYV), a civic education game, aims to teach conscious voter behavior to youth, simulating a fictional election campaign. Reflecting on the relationship between humans and technology, I argue that both curriculum design and the educational software the curriculum informs are political. Critically analyzing CYV’s scenario, I discuss how representation politics shape CYV’s civics curriculum and the gameplay it provides. Focusing on CYV creators’ inclusion and exclusion decisions on societal issues, I offer some suggestions to produce a more inclusive and relevant educational experience for marginalized communities.
What is Game-Based Learning?
Digital learning platforms have risen drastically in the last decades as an alternative to formal education in classrooms. Video game-based learning has been a popular method to teach non-playful or boring subjects to attract children’s attention. In recent years, educational video games have been an extension of digital learning methods. A significant amount of education and digital media research focusing simultaneously on “playfulness” and learning objectives has created a variety of educational video games in the market. Teachers and parents have shown significant interest in implementing educational video games into their kids’ lives because play increases their excitement to learn and engage with educational materials (Gee, 2007). Game topics include politics, democracy, and citizenship education. In this piece, I focus on Cast Your Vote, a voting simulation game, to discuss the social, cultural, and political values around civic education. To do this, I bring science and technology studies (STS) and game studies scholarships into conversation to analyze how civic education practices shape citizen identity.
Every Design Choice is Intentional, and People Should Know About It.
STS scholars have argued that digital technologies are deeply political systems based on their design choices (Winner, 1980). Algorithms that enact digital technologies represent social, cultural, and political values that their creators possess, and such values manifest themselves to the target audience through algorithms (Benjamin, 2019). As an extension of digital technologies scholarship, game studies scholars have argued that video games represent social, cultural, and political values through their narratives, characters, and mechanics (Bogost, 2010). As such, game scholars analyze visual and verbal representations in video games to demonstrate how particular sociocultural and political norms operate across inclusionary and exclusionary politics (Trammell, 2023). Building off this literature, I analyze Cast Your Vote (CYV), a voting simulation game, as an ideological and political tool influencing players’ citizenship identities. In this context, citizenship identity entails ideological expectations from an imagined citizen who plays CYV. I discuss the inclusion and exclusion politics of CYV to demonstrate how a digital technology piece contributes to shaping potential voters’ citizenship identities.
The Politics of Civic Games
I argue that the creator team purposefully curates their design and representation of societal issues in CYV as a range of political choices gamers have to make. Based on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion politics, CYV expects potential voters to exhibit a spectrum of citizen behavior. For such discussion, I focus on societal issues, dealing with the consequences of inclusion and exclusion politics on citizenship construction. Ultimately, I offer some suggestions regarding reaching a more diverse and, ultimately, a bigger audience.
The Education in Civic Games
The low voter turnout ratio among youth, especially in North America, is concerning. Various institutions have worked on increasing the numbers through game-based civic education. Research has demonstrated that civic education games increase youth’s civic knowledge and behavior (Barthel, 2013). However, can societies achieve inclusive democracy if only privileged communities’ issues are addressed in the civic education curriculum? If the civic education curriculum doesn’t represent marginalized groups in relation to privileged communities, how many of the users would resonate with the political debates that take place in voting simulations? Since societal issues’ representation and discussion in CYV affect potential voters’ citizen identities, I critically analyze the selection of societal issues conveyed in CYV. I suggest that if the content of civic education games addresses different social groups’ issues, these games will reach a more diverse and ultimately more representative audience.
Education in Civic Games. Image by Diva Plavalaguna, sourced from pexels.com
Walking You Through the Gameplay Experience
CYV game developers simulate a local election campaign featuring a fictional town and its politicians. The aim is to teach young citizens and future voters how to consciously pick the candidate to vote for at the ballot when the campaign ends. The game showcases different societal issues, and the player is expected to align their values with the matching candidate at the ballot. The scenario asks the player to pick five to seven societal issues they care about and then gather some information about these issues through online research and attending public debates. This exercise allows players to understand how these fictional candidates approach the issues the player cares about the most so that they can cast their vote at the end of the campaign with the most aligned candidate.
CYV demonstrates six categories of societal issues for the players to pick from: safety, schooling, community health, infrastructure, culture and leisure, business, and innovation. The specific issues under these umbrella categories are crime rate, juvenile justice, civic engagement, instruction, growing enrollment at schools, summer programs, health access, opioid crisis, water quality, safe cycling, public transportation, library updates, tourism, green spaces, minimum wage, balanced growth, and land development. The logic of this activity is that the player determines their priority on societal issues. Afterwards, they research how different candidates respond to and approach these issues. The gameplay constitutes analyzing the candidates and their promises through town hall debates and online research.
CYV makes its players empathize with a local election as if they are about to cast their vote, where players connect with their citizenship identities. Players demonstrate their voter profile virtually, prioritizing some societal issues CYV offers, as they are asked to pick five to seven issues. Let’s say the player cares about crime rate, juvenile justice, health access, water quality, public transportation, green spaces, and minimum wage. This potential voter tries to find the most aligned candidate but the candidates usually don’t align with every issue the player picks. For example, a politician who promises multiple new green spaces in the city, might not offer a raise for minimum wage. What if a politician aligns with the player on prioritizing green spaces, water quality, and public transportation but the player decides that they care about minimum wage the most? How does the player make their decision about which candidate to vote for? Hence, players decide on what issues they find most important and eliminate some on the way. This procedure initiates players to demonstrate their own citizen identity, with some issues being more important than others.
The Actors in This Game
CYV was created by a US-based nonprofit organization (NPO) called iCivics, which was founded to teach children civics and escalate civic engagement in the US. ICivics teaches citizenship, democracy, and politics through educational video games, aiming to increase youth’s civic knowledge and engagement through a method where learners also have fun. Designing an educational video game is not an easy task; NPOs such as iCivics collaborate with game studios and other stakeholders to create educational games like CYV. This collaboration includes a wide network of actors (Latour, 2007); such as game developers, software engineers, educators, instructional designers, artists, and more. The NPO brings its vision and expectations about educational content and delivery, and the studio executes the project. The question about the actors in this game is, why and how did the creator team decide on these representations?
As outsiders, we do not have much information on whether the creator team didn’t realize CYV was missing some significant debates happening in recent politics or kept “other” issues away from CYV based on their political ideology. The reason is not the point, really; the point is that there is an imagined audience for CYV, and as an STS scholar, I am interested in the inclusivity of knowledge resources. Thus, I intend to deal with these questions: Do these above-mentioned societal issues represent different demographics’ issues they care about? Do these societal issues lack some important subjects that might interest marginalized communities? What happens to the marginalized communities who care about immigration policies, reproductive health, and LGBTQ rights?
What Can Be Done Differently?
I suggest that CYV and further voting simulation games should integrate marginalized communities’ issues into the list the players prioritize at the beginning of the game. Therefore, players can see their priority issues addressed within the game they learn with. Voting simulations should discuss, for example, how politicians answer reproductive health-related questions in town hall debates. Thus, women prioritizing reproductive health among different issues see which candidate(s) they most align with. Going back to the previous discussion, a candidate who cares about reproductive health and aligns with the player’s values, might not align with the remaining issues the player picked. This case would initiate an examination in the player’s mind to decide the most significant issue they want to see in a politician. Comparing politicians’ responses to the question about reproductive health at the town hall debate will allow the player to decide whether reproductive health or numerous other aligned issues weigh in when choosing a politician. Therefore, potential voters get to think about their deal-breaker values in politicians, and how such decisions influence their votes. This exercise allows potential voters to make informed decisions about the candidate they vote for.
With educational curriculum design and policy, content inclusion and exclusion decisions are political. Given all these stakeholders in the creation process, I suggest that iCivics members in different roles, such as executive board members, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) coordinators, curriculum experts, and instructional designers, should reflect on whether their work represents not only privileged but also marginalized groups. If such stakeholders recognize that their work falls short in inclusivity but decide to proceed with that anyway, that’s another question about politics to think about.
Representing these seventeen social issues only in CYV is a political choice, and discussing such issues within the gameplay assumes citizens’ social, cultural, and political values. Implementing such issues into CYV and asking the players to pick the ones they value the most establishes an imagined citizen identity while limiting flexibility in the choice of values. Excluding “liberal” issues results in the exclusion of some communities from resonating with the game at the very beginning. In other words, this established set of values limits potential voters’ freedom in having different values.
Educational institutions promote civic education through various simulations, to inform communities about democracy and citizenship. Although such practices indeed increase society’s knowledge in civics, the absence of marginalized communities’ representation prevents societies from achieving an inclusive and representative democracy. Exclusion politics prioritizes privileged communities’ voices and overlooks marginalized communities, which deepens the gap between social groups. Thus, instructional designers should collaborate with experts who can speak to marginalized communities’ experiences when creating a civic education curriculum to inform future voters. This exchange of ideas will allow different social groups to resonate with the educational materials. Excluding these social groups’ topics doesn’t solve the issues out there, but including them establishes an opportunity for marginalized communities to cast their vote for the person they believe would accurately represent them.
Conclusion
Youth voter turnout has been declining for several years, and we cannot achieve inclusive democracy without fully representing different demographics on legislative levels. People of different ages, genders, and social and cultural backgrounds should cast their votes to request that their issues be represented on legislative levels.
ICivics, an NPO working on democratic involvement through video games, is an amazing resource for civics education. However, there are important considerations about inclusivity when designing and distributing educational materials such as educational video games. There are ways to access a broader audience from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, which is essential for inclusive democracy where every community group is heard and acknowledged. I suggest that this can be achieved by working with professionals who have experienced and/or mastered different communities’ issues.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Dayna Jeffrey.
References
Barthel, M. L. (2013). President for a day: video games as youth civic education. Information, Communication & Society, 16(1), 28-42.
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. Polity Press.
Bogost, I. (2010). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. MIT Press.
Gee, J. P. (2007). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy (Rev. and updated ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oup Oxford.
Trammell, A. (2023). Repairing play: A Black phenomenology. MIT Press.
