John Lennon concluded that if he wanted to build popular support for the concept of peace, he needed clever salesmanship and catchy slogans.
“We’re trying to sell peace like a product,” Lennon said. “Like people sell soap or soft drinks.”
David Martin Davies works in a traditional news medium. He hosts a daily talk show —“The Source” — on Texas Public Radio. But he’s also eager to break the bounds of traditional news presentation and consumption.
In 2018, Davies published a comic book which offered a kind of underground, alternative history of San Antonio, examining the city through a series of anecdotes about local protest movements and battles for social justice.
Davies’s latest project is a Pokémon-style video game, which breaks down this state’s voting laws by allowing players to guide a pink-haired avatar through a maze of barriers that correspond to the obstacles in the Texas election system.
“It’s kind of like the comic book I did,” Davies said. “Just trying to find ways to reach people.
“We’re talking to the same people all the time. How do we shake up the paradigm? Go where people are and bring information to them and present it in a way that engages them.”
If you enter the game unfamiliar with the intricacies of Texas election law, you’ll come away well-versed on details such as the lack of online voter registration, the long lines routinely faced by people of color and the fact that the state’s voter-identification law doesn’t accept student or federal tribal IDs.
Davies said it took close to three weeks to create the game, which is called, “Voting in Texas: The Game,” and is featured on the TPR website.
“I’ve been playing around with this type of software for a long time, experimenting with different ideas on how to use it to do storytelling,” Davies said. “Some of my ideas are more complicated than I can actually figure out.
“Like, I wanted to do an explanation for poverty and how hard upward mobility is. It would involve all these different algorithms. But this is something I figured I could actually tell, using narratives to explain voting and all the difficulties and some of the news behind it.”
As someone who learned basic civics by watching “Schoolhouse Rock!,” I’m a believer in the power of entertainment to cut through our walls of resistance to wonkiness. Davies’ video game could be a helpful educational tool to introduce Texas kids to an election system that has never been particularly user-friendly.
When you enter “Voting in Texas: The Game,” you are immediately greeted with an encouraging message that quickly turns into a warning about the challenges you’re about to face.
“Congratulations!!!! You rock!!! You are one of many who will decide the future.
“However, it won’t be easy. You live in Texas, which is the most difficult state to vote in according to a ‘cost of voting index’ study at Northern Illinois University.”
Davies’ game arrives at a time when Republican lawmakers are pushing to make the voting process even more restrictive in this state.
Texas House Democrats have left Austin for Washington D.C., denying Republicans a quorum in a bid to block GOP legislation that aims primarily to quash pandemic measures intended to make voting safer and easier. These include 24-hour voting, drive-thru voting, drop boxes for mail ballots and sending unsolicited mail-ballot applications to voters.
One provision would make it easier for partisan poll watchers to intimidate voters at polling sites. Another would require voters to submit either a driver’s license number or a partial Social Security number when applying for mail ballots. The information would be checked against the state’s voter database. If a voter has only one of those numbers in the database and lists the wrong one on the application, they’ll be blocked from voting.
It’s typical of the voter-suppression legislation being filed across the country this year. Many individual elements can be justified or explained away, but the entire package is clearly designed to chip away at Democratic turnout.
Former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro has compared it to point shaving in sports. Davies calls it “death by a thousand cuts.”
Davies doesn’t have big expectations for his video game. He’s just hoping that whoever plays it will come away feeling more engaged with the electoral process.
“This is a way for people to gain learned experience,” Davies said. “Frequently, I think you can use this type of technology to teach kids things about avoiding really miserable life experiences.
“I think gaming as a platform to illustrate complex ideas is something that should be explored.”
ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470
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