Geeky socialist credentials for the French presidentials

Bored by the never-ending French presidential campaign? Can’t wait for the end of it all? Follow the next three steps:

Step 1: Click here.

Step 2: On you keyboard, type the following sequence: ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA

Step 3: Enjoy.

For those of you who weren’t teenagers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and/or have no video game experience whatsoever, you have just unlocked an easter egg on the French Socialist party’s website by using the Konami code, a popular code sequence used in many video games to unlock bonuses and cheats. Unsurprisingly, very few media outlets reported on the hidden timer, even though a few geeky-minded journalists on Twitter noticed it:

Aah, tu tapes le Konami code dans l'infographie du PS (http://t.co/9UMmMyoK) et tu obtiens ça (via @Yogiimise) #geeks pic.twitter.com/zDy2pg1y

— Vivien Vergnaud (@Vergnaud) April 11, 2012

Clearly slick graphics aren’t the only tool the Socialist party is using to promote its candidate, François Hollande. The only problem is that only a tiny minority of voters actually know what the Konami Code is and what it does. It is nothing more than an amusing gimmick, similar to the Google bombs I wrote about previously: funny for the small number of people who are in the know, but useless as a campaigning tactic to reach the masses. Of course, the web-designers at avenue de Ségur (the campaign HQ) know this, and the easter egg is just a bonus to an otherwise well-designed interactive graphic aimed at criticizing Nicolas Sarkozy.

The following videos, however, have a much stronger potential for reaching out towards voters, especially young ones. Just like Hollande’s recent incursion into the realms of rap was an attempt to connect with the banlieue youth, the following clips are short, succinct and loaded with pop culture references (video games for the first, Internet memes for the second) to reach out towards young voters bored with traditional politics.

“Mot à Mot” (Word for Word) is a clever web-series the Socialists have been rolling out for the past few weeks. It gives short, fun updates on the campaign, each based on a theme (movies, TV shows, music, etc.). The heavy parodying of movie and video game titles is slightly distracting, but the real goal of the clips isn’t to get across a specific message; just to look cool and young.

French Presidential Campaign Fails As A Video Game

If you think the French presidential elections are boring, as many French do, you might be tempted to  try “Elections 2012: En Route Pour l’Elysée” (Elections 2012: On the Road to the Elysée), a new PC video game that lets you get into the shoes of a candidate and campaign your way to the presidential office. But against all odds, simulation game studio at Eversim has seemingly managed to make the game even worse than the original.

Full disclosure: I cannot judge this game the only way a true gamer can because I have not played it. Also, different gamers have different standards and different tastes. Simulation games never were my cup of tea, for instance.

But I have watched this long, painful teaser for the game; and I find it is a sufficient deterrent for any sane gamer out there :

Ignore thrilling game features such as “HUNDREDS OF QUANTIFIED POLITICAL OFFERS” or “CALCULATE THE PROJECTED DEFICIT BUDGET;” they are, after all, a staple of simulation games that try to replicate real world conditions and mechanics. Neither is there anything wrong with taking a serious topic and turning it into a video game. The serious gaming industry is booming and enables important subjects to reach new audiences.

The real problem here is not the idea of a 2012 French election game itself, but the way the project was carried out. Graphics are not pleasing to the eye and the interface is far from ergonomic, as you can see below. Simulation games are never the most appealing in terms of graphic design, and you can’t expect CGI quality for 19.95 Euros. A better idea would have been to stay minimalist but slick.

Screenshot of the "Elections 2012" game interface

Gameplay, according to reviews, is repetitive and confusing. You can listen to an explanation by one of the developers on France Info here. But according to video game portal Jeuxvideo.com:

Even if the proposed events are varied and credible (the game is regularly updated to stick to the news), and even if the quantity of potential promises is astronomical, the gameplay is all to often a repetition of the following sequence: I select my destination, I choose my promise, and I measure its effects on polls.

To be perfectly fair, that does sound like your average campaign, and you can’t blame a simulation game for trying to stick to reality. But the story line is the biggest problem with this game.”Elections 2012″ simulates real politics to the point where the events, candidates and proposals are all copied and pasted from the actual campaign (one impressive aspect of the game is the effort put into dubbing, with hours of original voice acting by real comedians). This is fine for a Flight Simulator or a Football Manager, where the player wants to have an exciting and realistic game experience. But politics were dull to start with, and instead of trying to spice things up, Eversim merely replicated that boring experience on a PC. 

Unfortunately this reminds me of one of the industry’s worst trends, i.e, using any action movie as a pretext for banging out a poorly designed and overpriced game, hoping that unexperienced buyers won’t tell the difference. The same has happened here, only this time with politics.

The result? An epic fail. Jeuxvidéo.com rated the game with an abysmal 8/20. Unless you are an absolute junkie for French politics, this game will provide mild entertainment for an hour at best. After that, even the real campaign might start to seem exciting.

François Bayrou’s Online Campaign: Booting the MoDem.

If you are a bored gamer in search of the latest entertainment experience, drop your controller, turn off Call of Duty and go campaign for François Bayrou.

You read that correctly. Centrist candidate François Bayrou’s new campaign website was released on February 7th and it is the first with a gaming twist. With the release of an iPhone app the day before, this is an attempt by the MoDem candidate to boost his online credentials, prompting French magazine Marianne to ask whether Bayrou is a geek.

Screenshot of François Bayrou's iPhone app

The new website emulates the point-system feature of many social media sites and applications like Foursquare (note that François Bayrou himself is not a Foursquare user but that you can check into his campaign headquarters). Instead of badges, however, MoDem sympathizers are rewarded with ‘decibels’ when they ‘make some noise’ online in favor of the candidate. Twitter users immediately picked up on the similarities.

Quand François #Bayrou se lance dans le #gaming pour sa nouvelle plateforme web, ça donne ça : http://t.co/02Rv617P

— Cécile Jandau (@Cecile_Jandau) February 8, 2012

Presidential candidate #Bayrou launches a new online platform inspired by #Obama campaign, video games and #foursquare: http://t.co/3ktR2NEv

— Rémi Noyon (@RemiJDN) February 7, 2012

This is not Bayrou’s first incursion into the social media world. Instead of announcing his candidacy on television or in print, he hosted a ‘twinterview’ on Twitter, an innovative but complicated exercise where users were asked to tweet questions to him (the event was closed to the press). François Bayrou is also very present on Facebook and Google +.

Screenshot of Bayrou.fr

Bayrou’s web campaign manager, Matthieu Lamarre, is striving to portray his man as a tech-savvy web user who is using social media to connect with ordinary French people. But the real man behind the scenes is Lamarre himself, who has multiplied media appearances to explain and promote Bayrou’s web strategy for the presidential elections. In the following CFJ (Centre de Formation des Journalistes, a Paris based journalism school) interview, for instance, we learn that Bayrou was an early-adopter of Google+ in its beta phase (see below for another interview):

Lamarre does a good job of stressing his candidate’s web-friendliness (see for example this France Info radio interview), and unlike other campaigns he smartly distances Bayrou’s web strategy from Barack Obama’s. He emphasizes that it makes no sense to copy what was done four years ago – as many candidates are doing- because the online differences between 2008 and 2012 are staggering. Overall, the 500 000 euros invested in Bayrou’s web campaign seem to be well spent, especially for Bayrou’s unique, slick magazine style website and despite criticism of the iPhone app’s unoriginality or of the new ‘gaming’ system’s lack of concrete incentives for action. So far, François Bayrou’s web strategy is a #win.

More :

– A Poligeek interview with Matthieu Lamarre:

Welcome !

© xkcd

Welcome to Geeking the Elysée!

In this blog, I aim to analyze the digital aspect of the 2012 presidential elections in France. How do the candidates and their campaigns use the Internet and new technologies? How do they envision these digital possibilities in their platforms? Who is a geek, and who is left behind?

In addition to the blog, I regularly tweet about French politics (you can see my Twitter feed and follow me on the widget below).

It is important to keep in mind that this is an entirely new project – a sandbox for testing and prying. Text, audio, video, embeds, links, graphs: nothing is off limits. Your suggestions and tips on what (free) tools to use and how to use them are welcome!

Which brings us to a second important aspect: interactivity. Feedback is crucial, especially if it helps me become a better blogger, and, ultimately, a better journalist. Please comment (but don’t feed the trolls).

So which politicians are masters of the web and which ones get tangled in it? Who supports HADOPI and who will abolish it? Who is at the forefront of online campaigning and who is still a noob?

Geek the Elysée with me, and you’ll find out.