McCain vs Obama: the campaigning just got virtual

Kill the pork! Bam! Bam! Bam!" I yell, banging down hard on the spacebar of my laptop. Vegetarians shield your eyes. I'm blasting pigs to oblivion, mercilessly frying them with a deadly laser beam. It's a video game called Pork Invaders, on the website of the US Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. As the name suggests, it's an imitation of the hit game Space Invaders, but with pigs instead of aliens. Naturally, the game isn't just for entertainment. It has a message, too. By zapping the hapless pigs, I'm learning that, if elected, Senator McCain plans to "seal the pork barrel" of wasteful spending in America and will "restore fiscal responsibility to the federal government".

Technology is increasingly being seen by politicians as a way of engaging with voters on core issues. But what surprised many was that it was Senator McCain who was the first to come up with a video game. The 72-year-old is generally regarded as a "Google-less" Luddite – mainly due to his own admission earlier this year that he relies on his wife and staff to operate his computer for him.

His rival, the Democratic candidate Barack Obama, 47, on the other hand, has embraced the internet. Visit BarackObama.com and you'll find a slick operation. At the top of the page is a signup form giving you the option of creating your own My.BarackObama.com account. This gives supporters a sense of involvement, and gives the campaign organisers a direct line of contact with them – a big help when it comes to drumming up donations.

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According to research by the Pew Research Centre's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), released in mid-September, Obama's campaign website has consistently attracted about three-quarters of the total traffic to his and McCain's sites (McCain's site gets 28 per cent of it). Obama's site also has five times more registered users than McCain's. It doesn't end there. Obama has become the darling of social networking, a master of so called "Facebook politics". He has hired Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook, to help with his campaign, and as of press time had 2,011,014 Facebook friends, while McCain had 558,737. On MySpace, Obama had 668,429 supporters, McCain 156,088. And on his official YouTube channel, Obama had 95,586 subscribers to McCain's 23,427.

Naturally, this internet traffic does not correlate directly with popularity in the general population – indeed, it suggests mainly that McCain's supporters do not use the internet as much as Obama's. And to be fair, McCain is not quite the digital neophyte he has been painted. When he ran for the White House in 2000, he staged the first cyber-fundraising event, and hosted a primitive web chat at a campaign stop in South Carolina using a laptop and a 56K modem. Over the last few weeks, McCain seems to have rediscovered some of his frontier spirit. Apart from adding the Pork Invaders game, his campaign website has substantially improved its social networking tools and customisation features.

The real political punch of social networks, however, comes from their ability to act as catalysts for grassroots activism – such as when supporters set up independent networks to help promote the cause. One such group is Obama for President, set up in January 2007 by the Chicago attorney Keith Mandell in Second Life, the online virtual community. This weekend, Obama for President hosted a music festival in Second Life, with live bands and DJs. The aim was to "celebrate Obama's historic run for President" and to encourage real-world donations to the campaign.

Mandell and his fellow organisers also wanted to motivate some of the 50 million Americans who did not register to vote in the 2004 election. "The goal of Second Life events is to reach people who might otherwise be unreachable," Mandell says. "And encourage them to become involved in Senator Obama's campaign, at a time when such involvement is essential for victory."

As more broadband users set up avatars in virtual realms such as Second Life, politicians have wasted no time in setting up shop there as well. For the most part, however, their pristine virtual headquarters remain empty, like a wet Sunday at a beach resort.

Having a Second Life presence can also backfire on you. In March 2007, Senator John Edwards' virtual HQ was vandalised by pranksters who put a giant feline rear-end on top of a building and a lump of waste matter below that screamed obscenities. Julie Germany, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, says Second Life might be popular, but it is also "wild and uncontrolled. You have naked people flying around, all sorts of things that make us uncomfortable enough as it is in the real world."

It's not just Second Life that is unpredictable – so is the internet in general. After one of McCain's campaign adverts suggested that Barack Obama was a lightweight celebrity like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, Hilton took umbrage, and at the beginning of August posted a spoof video on the comedy website Funny or Die referring to McCain as "that wrinkly, white-haired guy". Hilton said that being used in McCain's advert meant that she, too, was running for President. Reclining on a deckchair in a swimsuit and stilettos, she added: "I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead." It was hardly a publicity coup for the McCain camp.

But when well implemented, the internet can help politicians communicate directly with the public and show their human side, as Conservative Party leader David Cameron did in 2006 when he installed a webcam – or "webcameron" – in his kitchen. While clearing away the dishes, he declared: "I want to tell you what the Conservative Party is doing, what we're up to, and give you behind-the-scenes access."

Critics dismissed it as a cheap publicity stunt. But moves like this have become almost a requirement of campaigning. The only problem, according to the political analyst Tim Pendry, is that most people use social networks for entertainment, not to gather information. "A powerful viral video might hit the spot for many younger people, then be dispersed through Facebook and create a big impact," Pendry says. "But most people separate their interests from a bit of entertainment."

If anything, instead of uniting people, Pendry thinks social networks could make the electorate more cynical. "In the future, social networks look like they will create effective activist organisations, but they are just as likely to be movements of resistance as of engagement," he says. "The trend is towards a form of anarchy from below and cynical volatility at the top."

The idea of politics as entertainment is nowhere more highlighted than in the world of gaming. In mid-September, the software firm Stardock released The Political Machine Express, a free, downloadable game that puts you in the role of campaign manager for Obama or McCain. You get to give speeches and juggle the costs of running a campaign while trying to secure enough support to take your candidate to the White House.

Though gaming is currently thought of as entertainment, some believe it could turn into a political force in its own right. "Within 10 years," says Michael Noer, the executive business editor of Forbes magazine, "guilds formed on World of Warcraft or other online games will become political forces. Especially in Asia, look for these groups to start agitating for social change." He points out that these groups are used to playing specific roles – such as casting spells or printing 1,000 posters – which means that becoming politically organised would be an easy transition. "The instigators of the next Tiananmen Square could be members of the World of Warcraft group the Chinese Nathrezim Finger Guild."

Britain's internet activists The teenage politicos

The Social Liberalist Party (SLP) is a new voice in British politics, calling for a society where public services are melded with the free market to make them more efficient (but still free), and where taxes would only be paid on income you don't work for, such as interest and property speculation. Most of the SLP founders are in their teens. But the party, which was launched this year, is determined to make an impact, and is using the web and social networks to attract members and get its message out.

"By using social networking sites, the SLP simulates the sort of community network that the old parties rely on," says SLP leader Anton Howes, 17 (below). "Most people join a political movement because they've got a friend of a friend who's involved. The internet does this in hyperspeed. So we decided to use it to maximum advantage, using these sites not only to expand our membership but also to organise events and networks off the net." http://voteliberalist.org