A La République en Marche stand on “Minecraft”, a rebellious thinking game or even a shooting game representing Eric Zemmour: the presidential campaign is investing in the video game universe to convince a younger target, by betting on an “innovative” image .
It was with a cryptic message – a sequence of numbers between two emojis representing a brick and a pickaxe – that Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team addressed the end of March on Twitter to “Minecraft” fans, one of the most popular video games in the world.
The message is actually the address of a server allowing to explore a virtual world dedicated to the communication of the Head of State. By traversing the city of digital bricks, the players can in particular discover elements of the balance sheet of the quinquennium which ends or of the program of the president-candidate.
“The public is 15-20 year olds, a population that politicians are not necessarily interested in”, notes his campaign team, which intends to “involve in the civic debate of the moment”, while claiming to be “very modest on this initiative”.
In fact, the experience is “a bit empty”, analyzes Olivier Mauco, teacher at SciencesPo and specialist in video games and politics.
“If it’s a place of activism, you need strong forces. We must be able to discuss it with either + bots + (characters managed by the software, editor’s note), or people”, he adds.
If the use of “Minecraft” is unprecedented, video games and the social network Twitch intended for “gamers”, in particular via political interviews, have already been used on several occasions as an electoral communication tool.
Before the irruption of the “metaverse” in the marketing term, a fake Ségolène Royal, a Sarkozy island and a real office of the National Front had already appeared… in 2007 in the game “Second Life”, where hundreds of thousands of Internet users could live a new life.
“There was a systematic permanence of activists, you had meetings, it was much more lively”, recalls Olivier Mauco. The difference with today is that “online democracy no longer exists whereas in 2007 it was a hope.”
– Media stunt –
French presidential campaigns also see the emergence of activist productions, rarely commissioned by the official campaign team.
Quick to produce, they often consist of replicating known games and applying a simple political dressing to them, with the intention of making a media stunt.
Thus, at the beginning of 2022, a game dedicated to Eric Zemmour and called “le Z” was put online. It takes up all the rhetoric of the far-right candidate, represented confronting his enemies with the help of French flags.
La France Insoumise, experienced in the exercise, had imagined in 2017 an online game called “Fiscal Kombat”, a pastiche of the “Mortal Kombat” franchise, in which Jean-Luc Mélenchon faced several political figures to recover public money .
“It was a decent game, with a + gameplay + (way to play, editor’s note) serving the political message,” said Mr. Mauco.
This time, the party’s volunteers launched “The AEC (common future) is you”, a puzzle game to discover the candidate’s proposals.
“Here, the objective is not to reach existing users as is the case for Emmanuel Macron in + Minecraft +, but rather to contribute to the image of innovation (of the candidacy of Jean-Luc Mélenchon) as we saw it in his political meetings”, in particular with the holograms, explains to AFP Guillaume Doki-Thonon, co-founder of Reech, a company specializing in influence marketing.
Abroad, video games have also invested the political field, notably in Brazil with the satirical game “Kandidatos” or even in the United States.
The elected democrat Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez had thus taken part in 2020 in a part on “Among Us” broadcast live on Twitch, in order to support the candidacy of Joe Biden.
Supporters of the Democratic candidate had also created their virtual island on “Animal Crossing”.
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