The Alphaville Herald

My View of the Alphaville Elections

by Alphaville Herald on 20/04/04 at 3:16 pm

By Peter Ludlow

I’m dropping out of character and writing this under my real life name so that people will understand that I am being serious, but also because I am discussing this at a “meta” level. These comments are about the game; they are not in game.

First of all, I am quite certain that a mechanism was in place to ensure that Mr-President would win the election. This is consistent with all the facts that I had leading up to the release of the chat logs, and the chat logs corroborate this conclusion. The failsafe mechanism may have been initially designed to respond to potential attempts by the Richardson camp to flood the polls with outside votes. On the question of whether the mechanism was utilized or not we have only circumstantial evidence but it seems plausible that it was, and that this accounts for some of the voting patterns witnessed. On the further question of whether the primaries were fixed, we have only the implication that they were, but based on my familiarity with Mr. Soprano, I would conclude that there was some “there there,” which he was using as leverage on Mr-President.

Second, however, and more importantly, I don’t believe that any of this need reflect negatively on the typists behind JC Soprano and Mr-President. I think that both Jeremy Chase and Arthur Baynes are good people. One has openly chosen to play a mobster. The other has not so openly chosen to play a corrupt politician in the spirit of JFK, who allegedly relied on the mob to help fix the election results in certain key precincts. If Mr. Baynes wants to roleplay that way he is free to do so. On the other hand, if it is part of their game to fix the election, it is certainly within our place as fellow gamers to expose the fix.

Originally I sat on the election-fixing evidence in my possession. What we had, in effect, was a three-player game including the mobster, the corrupt politician, and the in-the-know newspaper guy who knew the inside story but sat on it to protect his “confidential sources.” On Friday, however, I spoke with Henry Jenkins of MIT, who was interested in broader aspects of the Alphaville Elections. He wanted to know if this sort of political roleplay (in the Alphaville Government Elections) was preparing people for political life, or whether it was just an escape from true political engagement. I remarked that for younger players like Ashley Richardson (14 year old Laura McKnight) it probably was a kind of rehearsal for future political involvement. When I returned to the blog after talking to Professor Jenkins I found a number of players ridiculing Ashley Richardson for being a “poor loser” etc. The conjunction of these events made me think: did I want to continue roleplaying as the cozy inside journalist, rubbing elbows with Alphaville’s power gamers and protecting them while wrapping myself in the mantle of “journalistic ethics?” What kinds of lessons were we teaching Ashley and other younger players about political life? What would it say if we messed them over and left them with a sense that there had been no fair play, and that there was no way for the truth to come to light?

In the end, I decided I didn’t like that game — I didn’t like the game of the bourgeois newspaper guy hanging at the country club with the successful politician and the successful mobster. The game platform offered me a choice in how to play. I chose to play my way; I chose to release the story. Sorry if it upset the apple cart, sorry if it messed up The Alphaville Government, and sorry if it made JC angry, but the game was going all wrong. It was a game for sure, but nothing is ever *just* a game. Games have consequences. Games also give us an opportunity to break out of the roles and actions that we might be forced into in real life. I decided to take advantage of that opportunity. I freed my game.