During the height of the 2004 election, when Persuasive Games had released a few officially endorsed games about various issues and candidates, and after this website was scarcely six months old and everything about mainstream political games seemed new and shiny, I remember making a prediction in a press interview. In 2008, I divined, every major candidate will have their own PlayStation 3 game.

I was very wrong about that.

I can't find the quote -- it may not have made it to print, mercifully -- but I did find other similar sentiments. Here's one from an article late in the 2004 election cycle by Tom Loftus: "Already tired of hearing politicians say 'visit my Web site' every five minutes? Wait until 2008, when that stump speech staple may be replaced with a new candidates' call: 'Play my game." It's still early -- yesterday's "Super Tuesday" primaries and caucuses are the first to really narrow the field. But this year seems to boast less interest in election games than last year's. Browse through the political games archives to see what I mean. There were no less than four different new or revised election games, including one published by UbiSoft. There were games by and for a variety of candidates on both tickets. This year we have the rehashed White House Joust 2008 and a game about Chimps beating each other up.

There are reasons for the slow growth of games compared to other technologies for political outreach. The most influential one is also the most obvious: since 2004, online video and social networks have become the big thing, as blogs were four years ago. But another comes down to limited investment on the part of the political community in creating new games -- certainly games and blogs and social networks and video can all coexist. All in all, we're in the same place in 2008 we were in 2004, with some of the novelty removed.

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