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Cats Your Vote is a mobile game that uses cat memes to teach civic engagement, relying on collective action to change the experience for individuals.
Educational video games haven’t always been successful — it can be challenging to embed learning or training within entertainment. Cats Your Vote successfully rides the line between entertaining and educational as it uses cat memes to demonstrate the impact of civic engagement.
Cats Your Vote, developed by students and faculty at the University of Southern California, is a mobile game where players embody cartoon cats. The game provides a series of air-hockey style puzzles, where these cats swipe a puck at bowls of food while avoiding obstacles. Each level increases the complexity of these swipe puzzles, inserting more walls in between the puck and the targets and activating traps.
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Interspersed into the puzzle levels are opportunities for players to vote on changes to the game, like raising taxes to increase the number of swipes per level or provide players with a treat each day. When players reach a certain level, they’re able to vote on these ballot initiatives, effectively changing the game for everyone.
While the puzzles are challenging and interesting, it’s these ballots that are at the heart of the game. Players have the opportunity to act collectively to change this puzzle game for individuals. They then have to live with the results of these ballots as they continue to play the game. Each time they win a level, they’ll lose some catnip to the taxes that they voted on.
Learning to modify the game’s mechanics in a responsible way is a low-stakes way of experiencing the effects of voting in real life. Cats Your Votes allows players to explore voting and civic engagement while still playing a mobile puzzle game, without the feeling of playing a game for education.
Cats Your Votes isn’t just puzzles and voting, however. There’s a shop where players can purchase power-ups to use to solve the puzzle levels. Players also have the opportunity to post memes to the Cats Your Vote Twitter page from within the game. Each meme features a cat and a message related to voting. This function is less hard-hitting than the voting measures but no less compelling.
The creators of Cats Your Vote wanted this game’s approachable cat world and relatable memes to speak to a generation about engagement in the political world. By sitting with the repercussions of their voting within the game, Cats Your Vote explores the power of decision making and voting. While the creators have stated explicitly that Cats Your Vote “does not aim to make a moral argument for virtual civic duty,” it’s easy to see why this game could be powerful and important on the road to the 2020 presidential election.
Of course, Cats Your Vote isn’t the first game to explore themes of civic engagement. Any game that incorporates social components, from leadership and structure of raiding parties in MMOs to real-life groups playing tabletop RPGs, necessarily deals with the compromises players make to be part of a group. But even historical games like Civilization can show the impact of political choices. Cats Your Vote aims to engage with civic responsibility more directly than these other types of games while retaining the game-like feel and enjoyment.
Cats Your Vote succeeds in its civic mission in part because that doesn’t seem to be its focus. The developers recognized that reaching a young, game-playing population wasn’t about using real-world political examples, but rather creating a compelling game based on themes that resonated with them. Making the game explicitly about voting and its ramifications makes the political meaning more apparent than it is in other social games, but embedding it within cat memes makes it palatable as a game.
Cats Your Votes is currently in closed beta testing and will be released on Apple and Android August 20, 2020. For anyone interested in casual mobile puzzle games, cats, or voter education, its worth the wait.
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