SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Politics sometimes seems like a game, and that's especially true in a U.S. presidential election year.

Now, a new computer game called "Political Machine" casts you as Democrat Barack Obama, Republican John McCain, or other politicians trying to win the White House.

"You can choose your candidate or design your own and define their characteristics such as their stance on the war in Iraq, tax cuts, to prayer in school," said Brad Wardell, chief executive of developer Stardock.

"All the characters are bobble-heads, so it reminds people it is a game, but the underlying issues are real and are based on real-world demographic information."

Stardock knows a thing or two about strategy: the company is famed for its space-based strategy games such as "Galactic Civilizations" and "Sins of a Solar Empire."

The underlying mechanics of "Political Machine" will be familiar to veterans of strategy games that usually have players collect resources, build facilities and make weapons.

"In this version you actually build a campaign headquarters and outreach buildings, and those generate resources to recruit people to your campaign," Wardell said.

Instead of weapons like nuclear cannons and energy beams, players deploy spin doctors and smear merchants to take down opponents and boost their own ratings. Instead of conquering planets, players must win over enough states to carry them to electoral victory.

"As a candidate you have to make some choices that are difficult. How people feel about illegal immigration in New York is different than how the fell about it in, say, Arizona," Wardell said.

Stardock used census data and exit poll surveys to build models of voters across America, but judgment calls were made when assigning candidates attributes like charisma, which help determine how they are perceived by voters.

The game also offers alternate scenarios, such as the 1860 election that preceded the U.S. Civil War, and more whimsical ones like seeing what Europe or an alien planet would be like if U.S.-style elections were transplanted there.

Stardock made a previous version of the game ahead of the 2004 showdown between presidential incumbent George W. Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry.

"We thought, wouldn't it be cool to make an engine that could predict elections, and then we wrapped a game around it," Wardell said.

"One thing as a company that we are really good at doing is statistical modeling. When we were constructing the engine we want there to be a purely mathematical outcome."

The game had mixed success in predicting the outcome of the 2004 election: it picked Kerry over Bush but correctly foresaw that the contest boiled down to who won Ohio.

So what about this year?

"It's basically whoever wins North Carolina is going to win, and right now the game has a slight edge to McCain," Wardell said. "The only thing that gets weird with McCain is that his issues are different from his party on a lot of things and the game has a hard time constructing turnout for Republicans. It's never been tested with someone like McCain."

"Political Machine" went on sale this week for personal computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system.

(Reporting by Scott Hillis, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

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