MTV’s Fantasy Election ’12 turns the U.S. election into a game

While many of us are still hurting from our fantasy hockey picks this season, MTV is trying to get youth in the United States interested in the federal election with a new kind of fantasy game.

In its latest attempt to promote voting amongst its key demographic, MTV is unveiling a new online game, Fantasy Election '12. Instead of picking hockey players, young voters instead draft a team of candidates running for the presidency, the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives.

As Kotaku states, MTV acknowledges that many of their target market are no longer spending hours watching the television channel, as the case used to be. The company, who is well-known for their partnership with Rock the Vote in past elections, is seeking out the 18-24 demographic through social media and mobile.

The basics of the game are very much the same as a sports fantasy draft: pick the players (or in this case, candidates) that you think will be the best performers in the long run. In an interview with CNN, MTV's vice president of public affairs, Jason Rzepka, explained how the game works: candidates will earn points based on how long they are leading in the running, how transparent they are about funding, how much they engage with voters on social media, how open they are about their stances on issues and whether they focus on the substantive issues rather than attacking opposing candidates.

Fantasy Election '12 will most likely be rooted in Facebook, although the exact details won't be revealed until the game beta launches in June. Kotaku reports the game will also use Foursquare and GetGlue to award points to players for attending town halls and watching televised candidate debates.

Depending on how many points they earn through civic engagement and the performance of their fantasy candidates, players of Fantasy Election '12 can win big prizes. Rzepka says MTV is leveraging "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in prizes for the game, including tickets to the MTV Video Music Awards or an invitation to the inaugural ball in Washington next January.

While some are skeptical of how effective this could be, Ben Sawyer, founder of the Serious Game Initiative, thinks this will have a positive impact.

"One of the big opportunities with fantasy sports is it requires you to learn the players much more broadly then [sic] you would otherwise," said Sawyer in a Forbes story. "…applying that same idea to legislative politics seems interesting to me. I'm not sure it'll be a big element to presidential politics, but legislative politics could be really interesting here."

With just as many problems north of the border as in the U.S., there has long been a push to get young Canadian voters engaged in the civic process, too. There have been plenty of television campaigns and rants from Rick Mercer every election, but no social games with this kind of advertising push have happened just yet. Yahoo! Canada News' own Political Points blogger, Andy Radia, says he thinks using games to encourage engagement is a great idea, and that it could be useful if ever implemented in Canada.

"There are several reasons for low youth turnout during elections," Radia said. "One of the main reasons, I think, is because young voters can't relate to the candidates and because they don't feel like they understand the issues."

"So something like this that gets them engaged and allows them to become more familiar with the candidates can only help."

The invite-only beta for Fantasy Election '12 launches in June and will open to the public around September.

(Photo MTV Power of 12)