The Game: How Campaigns' New Obsession With Social Media is Hurting America

Klout. Kred. Proskore. There are more ways than ever for people in politics to quantify their influence online. As my colleague Micah Sifry pointed out last week, very little of it has any real meaning — and yet newspapers like the Washington Post persist in joining in with toys like the "Mention Machine," a page that tracks news and Twitter mentions of each candidate.

The thing about attaching numbers to people's names is that it usually makes them want to make the number go up. Call it gamification if you want. The truth is that it's human nature, and as more people pay attention to social media, it is creating a sort of downward behavioral spiral. Candidates wanting more points on the social media scoreboard are urging supporters to tweet and post to Facebook on their behalf — spreading borderline spam on social networks and doing nothing to make the campaign season less of a horse race when that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Rather than just making things worse, there are better things that papers like the Post could be doing.

That tendency to get caught up in scores and rankings is exactly the flaw in human nature that Ian Bogost exposed with "Cow Clicker," a parody of FarmVille-style Facebook games. Writing for Wired, Jason Tanz does brilliant work explaining the game and why Bogost built it:

The rules were simple to the point of absurdity: There was a picture of a cow, which players were allowed to click once every six hours. Each time they did, they received one point, called a click. Players could invite as many as eight friends to join their “pasture”; whenever anyone within the pasture clicked their cow, they all received a click. A leaderboard tracked the game’s most prodigious clickers. Players could purchase in-game currency, called mooney, which they could use to buy more cows or circumvent the time restriction. In true FarmVille fashion, whenever a player clicked a cow, an announcement—”I’m clicking a cow“—appeared on their Facebook newsfeed.

In just a few months, the uninteresting-by-design game — “I didn’t set out to make it fun,” Bogost told Tanz — accumulated 50,000 users. Bogost had built the thing to prove that something you might call a "game" in many cases could really just be a systemic exploitation of human impulse, made easier by how effortless it is to quantify something on the Internet, then share it.

As a sort of side-quest in the game "win the most votes," campaigns are developing an obsession with social media metrics. Ginning up a large number of retweets or mentions worked for Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain as part of a media strategy that pushed them back into public view, and from there into a few more fund-raising dollars. It should be no surprise, then, that the latest pair of almost-credible outliers, Jon Huntsman and the longer-shot former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer, are turning online for help.

Roemer has hired Adam and Zach Green, a father-and-son team of Twitter consultants, to help him find traction online. We know Green and son as skilled analysts of Twitter conversations, and people who we've worked with to see if we could glean anything of interest about candidates from the types of conversations being had about them. They built one of the first and most comprehensive Twitter dashboards of the election cycle. I appreciated it at the time because it tracked interesting metrics like changes in Twitter followers. Now, though, they themselves seem to have slid downward along a spiral they helped to create: Having established one of the earliest 2012 leaderboards to rank presidential candidates by @-mentions and retweets, they're at work for a candidate who then became motivated to improve his score.

Roemer's campaign now has a device through which supporters can "donate" the use of their Twitter handle to the former Louisiana governor's election effort. It uses the Twitter API to push what Team Roemer promises is no more than one tweet per day through each supporter's account, towards the stated goal of getting "1,000 accounts that share Buddy's message every day." The program picks which account passes along a message based on how often Team Roemer wants to put tweets into the tweet stream and which accounts have yet to send a message that day. There is no targeting to a volunteer's particular social connections. Once a day, the campaign wants to turn its supporters' Twitter accounts into mindless zombies — all in the name of raising stats. The campaign is achieving its desired result: Roemer's new follow rate, retweets and mention count have all gone up. This doesn't do much for the follower's investment in the campaign, or an understanding of Roemer by the public at large; it did, however, generate a glowing story on Mashable, and more white noise into a political campaign already low on signal.

Jon Huntsman's campaign has a similar set-up, offering volunteers a list of sample tweets they can push out with a press of a button. The result of this pursuit of better numbers online is more scripted, one-way campaign messaging on Twitter. What benefits come along with that new high score? Ask Herman Cain — getting the most votes still requires getting the most votes, and, you know, not being forced off the campaign trail as the result of a scandal.

All of this is kind of a bizarre twist in the long history of game theory and what it does to online politics. Now it's the politicians, and not their supporters, pursuing better results on some online scoreboard. But for years, as far back as the Howard Dean and George W. Bush campaigns of 2004, activists on the left and right have used their understanding of human motivations to build tools that try to make supporters do more than they otherwise would.

Watch every 2012 campaign work online and you'll see this in action. Newt Gingrich's Newt Hampshire uses NationBuilder's leaderboard function, giving activists "points" each time they take a vaguely useful action on Gingrich's behalf. MyMitt, Mitt Romney's national action platform, tracks points in much the same way. Barack Obama's re-election effort is surely tracking every phone call made, tweet sent, Facebook post created and door knocked upon, and will use those numbers to set supporters in competition with one another. It's already happening; earlier this year, the campaign held a "competition" to see which of its state-level Twitter accounts could accumulate the most followers in a set amount of time.

As Patrick Ruffini of the D.C. firm Engage reminded me a few months ago, this has become a science. It's not just about what kind of competition the campaign sets before its supporters; polish matters, too.

"If you're smart, you pay attention to the color of the button, you pay attention to the coloring of the text, you pay attention to how your splash page is laid out," Ruffini told me. "And I think this can be powerful as well in delivering the same, if not more, increases in the level of action that people may take."

In September I began talking with Bogost about how games were or weren't being used in politics. He's uniquely qualified to have that conversation: He created the "Dean for Iowa" game for Howard Dean's 2004 run at the Democratic presidential nomination, has consulted for other political campaigns through his company, Persuasive Games, and is the author of a book on games in politics. Dean for Iowa is still online, although some features have been removed.

"So many of the efforts that we see, whether it's games or social networks or whatever, they're really about campaigning," Bogost told me then. "Facilitating support, or gaining new support, and that's what's really come to replace political discourse in politics. We talk about campaigning and the game of political support and attention. And we don't talk about platforms or policy during elections, right, we only do so when forced to."

Bogost was talking about the games that supporters are currently playing — namely, the ones that reward them for retweeting or giving money. But the same is becoming true for politicians themselves — it seems that they, too, or the hard-up insurgents among them anyhow, are starting to click on cows. Instead of getting the politicians to earn our support by demonstrating their value as problem-solvers, or their ability to build coalitions, or their capacity to generate valuable new ideas, the builders of leaderboards and definers of the political conversation are using this fabulous network we've got to reward candidates for ... getting more likes, retweets, or followers.

If candidates actually respond to the metrics that measure them online — if that can drive a conversation that influences their behavior, even the behavior of lesser-known candidates — then this is a missed opportunity. Dear Internet: You're doing it wrong.

Bogost and I spoke a little bit about the kind of behavior citizens should reward, or, put another way, the kind of games a good (as in, good for you) candidate might play.

"When you really stop and think about it, the citizen ought really only to be concerned with campaigns as they facilitate results," Bogost told me. "Whereas for the candidate, the campaign is the only result, I mean, that's how you keep your job, or get it. And that dissonance between what politicians want or need in order to continue to be public servants, if we use that word, and the way that they communicate with their constituency is sort of broken to me. Because the way that they communicate to their constituency is in the language of campaigns rather than in the language of their daily experience."

Bogost believes it would be almost unthinkable that, in the current climate, candidates would be rewarded for talking about platform and policy rather than for trading pithy jabs in debates. This is an opening into a wider conversation about how to change what we now know as the "election cycle." If the goal is a citizen's agenda for political discourse, as is the goal of a Guardian initiative announced late last year, he's pessimistic about the chances of success, and particularly sour on the idea that games and game theory could have a role in changing the discourse.

But if an achievement as innately silly as "more retweets" can win the attention of a presidential candidate, why not do more to evaluate them in the public online sphere based on metrics that say more about their potential as a public official? Especially over the past two years, information of this type has become easier for programmers to get to. The unfinished bit is making a competition in which a candidate can "win the Internet" by accumulating the most small-dollar donors, or by making the most in-state campaign stops of an hour or more in a week, or by staking out the most detailed position on oh, I don't know, the future of American Internet infrastructure.

For example:

Mitt Romney's campaign could be described in the Washington Post's campaign finance explorer not in terms of totals raised and spent, but describing how his campaign is really financed, perhaps in terms of large- versus small-dollar donors, number of donors, sources of funds by industry, or the structure of outside groups spending on his behalf that makes more about him unknowable. The St. Petersburg Times could include, on each article page about Newt Gingrich, a widget revealing his Politifact accuracy record. An ongoing debate over the truthiness of fact-checking outlets like Politifact is of course still raging, but that hasn't stopped an MIT Media Lab graduate student from using access to Politifact's proprietary API to build "truth goggles" that can highlight habitual earners of Politifact's pants-on-fire rating, or statements that Politifact had previously declared to be bunk. And the same way FourSquare has rewarded me with a badge because if how often I check in at bowling alleys, Jon Huntsman could earn a "ground game" badge for checking in at multiple New Hampshire campaign stops every day for several weeks.

Even social media could play a factor: For instance, rather than rewarding candidates for getting @-mentions, what if they were rewarded for giving them? An Expert Labs project is an early experiment with this. Called the Federal Social Media Index, it already rewards agencies that ask questions and get answers. If we must highlight candidates' use of social media, why not highlight a use that's more likely to involve two-way communication?

If any of this could make politics more accessible to people who do not breathe and eat it for a living, that would certainly be a more worthwhile use of developer time than yet another social media dashboard.

It's unclear if that could or will happen, but it's well understood that the current "game" of politics has rules that serve just a few and to which an even smaller number of people can relate. Presenting the system as it is does nothing to change this — but reframing it might help make it better.

"We don't win or lose, really, we persist," Bogost told me. "And things happen to us, and some of them are better and some of them are worse, and it's hard to tell on a day to day basis what your score is. Even though I'm an advocate for games, maybe what we ought to do is present the political system as less of a game and more of a process ... by which change gets made over time."

Changing this understanding would be a process in itself and would certainly take time. But building a "mention machine" to score the game as it is instead of trying to rewrite the broken rules won't help Americans understand the election. That's just asking everyone to be happy with the chance to click another cow.

Update — Adam Green replies:

Our goal is not simply 'raising stats' as you claim, it is attracting
supporters for Roemer who will help spread his message. Donated tweets are a multiplier. Sending a couple of hundred donated tweets a day is generating conversations about Roemer that are resulting in thousands of tweets a day. That is the goal. Think of the donated accounts as volunteer spokesmen who are given pamphlets and told to canvas their neighborhood. The donated tweets are the pamphlets. This is a standard campaign practice. Are these volunteers zombies? Is this work done solely to see how many pamphlets can be handed out?

This post has been corrected to spell "Proskore" correctly.