The Constitution says that there can be no religious tests for holding office in the United States, but to me that just means there’s untold potential for secular tests. And like most of life’s problems, I’m convinced the answer lies somewhere in video games. Politicians can make empty promises (or, more recently, terrifying promises you hope are empty) all day long, but it is much harder to hide who you are at play. Based on absolutely no science whatsoever, I’ve decided that the following video games function as reasonable predictors of a person’s character, political beliefs, and ability to govern. Were I in charge, you’d need to play them all before you could even tour the White House, much less live in it.
Democracy 4
To be honest, I don’t like the Democracy series too much. I am a big weirdo who rarely plays video games these days unless they look like a book or a spreadsheet, but even then it just feels too clinical for me.
But maybe it’s not a fun video game because it isn’t? Maybe it really is the state-of-the-art political analysis tool it looks like? If candidates play Democracy 4, voters will be able to see what policies they’d prioritize as President, which interest groups would approve and disapprove of their options. What probably won’t happen is them having fun, but who said being President was?
Disco Elysium
I will never, ever pass an opportunity to squeeze in a recommendation for Disco Elysium, however tangential. This is why nobody ever turns to me for comfort after their wife leaves them.
It’s true that the game tracks your political beliefs based on your responses and assigns you a label accordingly, but I will be the first to admit that particular system isn’t as deep as it first seems. All four in-game ideologies are intentionally silly caricatures, represented by a silly man who, it’s implied, doesn’t actually care about politics and just wants a distraction from his horrible life. I also won’t pretend any serious candidate for President will, if forced to play this game, do anything but a moralist playthrough.
But even if the candidates’ in-game responses aren’t interesting, I still think there would be a certain value in their real-life reactions. What does the candidate say when faced with open rancorous condemnation of the modern political system? How much sympathy do they show to the game’s cast when it arises? What do they do when it’s their responsibility to tell a woman her husband is dead? How do they handle an overt racist insulting their partner? Will they run away if told to pay their hotel bill? These are the questions that can easily sway an election.
Doom
Doom is quite possibly the United States’s single greatest cultural achievement. It doesn’t matter where in the world you live, or where you were born. In that split second your shotgun reduces a Pinky to salsa, you are an American. As I see it, any Presidential candidate with video evidence of themselves beating the original Doom no longer needs to wear an American flag lapel pin. Throw in Doom II, and they can skip the oath of office. If they’re both done on Nightmare difficulty, they may commit one free act of treason.
Facade
Made in a time when AI was somehow both worse and better than it is now, Facade follows a simple premise: two old friends from college invite you over for what you think will be a fun get-together but instead they single-handedly expect you to save their failing marriage. Using a crude text parser, you must type out what you say to Trip and Grace and pray you find the magic words that will make them fall back in love again.
I don’t expect the President to fix anyone’s marriage, especially two people who just scan everything you say for keywords and assume the context. But I do expect the President to treat their office and duties with all the gravity they deserve, and Facade is the perfect test of a person’s capacity to take things seriously. Nobody plays this game the way the creators intended, because it’s much more fun to run around yelling insults, profanity, and the unspeakably offensive word “melon” until Trip gets pissed off and throws you out of his apartment.
I don’t even care if a candidate wins this game or not as long as they honestly try. Prove to me you can care about the problems of two horrible robot yuppies, because it’s a small fraction of what the President needs to care about. If any candidate (myself included) goes straight to the troll playthrough, they need to leave. We’ll be fine, they just have to go.
Fallout: New Vegas
Candidates will also need to submit a written essay explaining their choice of endgame faction and how it reflects their potential administration. If you go with Caesar’s Legion, that real-life Speech skill had better be maxed.
Harvester
This weird gory FMV point-and-click adventure was made as a satirical response to the violent video game controversies of the 90s. Obviously video games aren’t training people to be serial killers … but if a game did do that, what would it look like?
Despite its political roots, I don’t think there’s any valuable message or skill for future Presidents to be found in Harvester. I just think it’d be really funny to watch politicians play a game designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. Still, if a candidate’s reaction to watching a child’s skull get caved in with a baseball bat is “Hahaha, hell yeah,” now we’ll know.
The Jackbox Party Pack 3
If you write “Cum” in Quiplash every single time, you are not fit to be President.
JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain
I’m going with the one I liked best as a kid, but really you could swap this out for any old edutainment game. I don’t think it’s a big ask that the President must possess an elementary school education. And there’s no better way for a candidate to prove their administration will listen to scientists than using a shrink ray on your robot friend so he can destroy molecules by playing Breakout.
The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante
This RPG/VN hybrid has the player living out the life of a noble child in a world with an absurdly rigid caste system. While it’s a highly political game, the fantasy setting is so removed from reality that the real-world applicability is limited, but it’s still there. When Sir Brante reaches adulthood, they face the pivotal choice of if they’ll live the rest of their life as a nobleman, priest, or commoner. The Lot a candidate wants would say a lot about where their sympathies will lie as President. Equally revealing is if they have the planning ability to reach their intended Lot or somehow get locked out of it because they cried too much as a baby.
But whatever Lot he goes down, Sir Brante will start to be judged by a new political spectrum that’s some variant of “be a dick or don’t.” We’ll have a hard numerical value of how much of a dick each candidate is. You can’t put a price on data like that.
Most importantly, though, this game forces candidates to prioritize. The title says “Suffering” for a reason. Be it your career, your health, or your friends and family, every single choice you make comes at the expense of something, and the golden ending that goes well for everybody doesn’t exist. When somebody has to be left worse off for the President’s actions, who will it be and why? Not your sister, I hope.
Metal Gear Solid
I’ve been trying to avoid games with overt didactic political messages because I just don’t think that’s an effective way of delivering them. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of my favorite games ever fit that description, but if a middle-aged politician doesn’t think unrestrained capitalism is bad, I doubt playing BioShock will single-handedly change their mind.
If I’m going to put a game like that on my list, it has to be the very best of the best, and that’s the Metal Gear series. There’s not much I can say about these games that smarter people than I haven’t said already, but if a future President plays through the entire series there’s a good chance by Inauguration Day they’ll be wary of further enabling the military-industrial complex. Then again, there’s an equally good chance they’ll think all of the villains are cool as shit and we need to build real Metal Gears immediately. We’ll put this in the “maybe” pile.
Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Even if IQ was an actual thing that mattered, I won’t pretend that answering a bunch of brain teasers tied together by a Japanese impression of British stereotypes is the way to measure it, especially since a lot of the Professor Layton series’s puzzles are very, very stupid, as seen above.
The President does not need to beat this game, but they do need to want to beat it. Not only should the President possess basic cognitive function (Brain Age or Rockstar’s forgotten PS2 classic Clock Drawing Simulator would be good too), they should possess a curious, analytical mind. As head of state, they’ll face countless dilemmas that would remind the good Professor of a puzzle, and they need to be willing to seek out intelligent answers.
On top of that, someone would finally collect all the hint coins hidden inside the White House. They’ve been lying around since the Monroe administration.
Saviorless
This is a decent—if short—puzzle platformer with some rather nice art, but despite its good qualities it’s not likely to be on most people’s favorite games list. It seems like an odd choice for a game the President should be required to play, but it makes this list due to one simple fact: Saviorless was made in Cuba.
The President of the United States is a position of global influence, and their decisions impact the lives of ordinary people not just in America, but all over the world, and not always for the better. The President needs to be forever conscious of how every country, including the “bad ones,” is filled with ordinary people with lives and dreams of their own that they will affect. It was the Obama administration’s relaxation of Cuban sanctions that allowed this game to be crowdfunded, and the Trump administration’s restoration of those sanctions that kept it from releasing until this year.
Maybe one video game from a country America is supposed to hate isn’t enough to solve all foreign policy issues, but there’s still a lesson to be learned. The next great artist or scientist who will create something you love could be living anywhere. If possible, try to help them realize their dreams. Or at the very least, don’t kill them.
Slay the Princess
Full disclosure (wouldn’t want to be an unethical game journalist, after all): I interviewed the developers of this game and thought they were pretty great, but I’m not saying anything here I didn’t already think before that happened.
I genuinely believe you can tell a lot about a person by what they do in Slay the Princess for the very first time. For example, if they consistently side with the Princess and encounter The Damsel, it could mean they’re staunch pacifists who value the sanctity of all life and, in a position of power, would prioritize peaceful conflict resolution above all else. Or it could just mean they’re horny. But we’ve narrowed it down!
Sonic Adventure 2
Everybody should play Sonic Adventure 2.
Spent
I won’t pretend this free browser game is a meaningful equivalent to actually living a month in poverty, but it’s about as close to it as anyone who can afford to run for President is going to get. They get to see a glimpse of what life is like for their most needy citizens, and we get to see how well they’d manage a budget, if they get past the initial confusion about how you don’t buy any missiles in this game.
The one admitted downside of Spent is that it is far too easy to minmax your money by doing what is essentially an evil playthrough. In past runs of the game, I’ve lied, stolen, neglected my children, mooched off my friends, ignored my debts, and even abused myself by never, ever going to the doctor. Or eating. But it was all worth it to say I had a whole thousand dollars to my name. That said, knowing if a Presidential candidate is evil or not is still useful information, so I say make them play it.
Super Mario Bros. 2
I’m actually not asking for anything new here. Every US President since George H. W. Bush has been required to know that the American version of Super Mario Bros. 2 is a modified version of Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic. The future of American diplomatic influence in the Pacific hinges on the President knowing this.
Survive the Century
Oh hey, another free browser game! In this one, you play as the editor of a curiously omnipotent news site that every government in the world listens to (on the off chance we have that power here, give me money). Decade by decade, you must use your influence to sway climate change policy over the course of the 21st century.
It’s easy to forget in the midst of more pressing short-term issues like the green M&M no longer being sexy, but there’s kind of a slow-moving threat to human civilization as we know it, and we should probably do something to mitigate the damage while we’re not yet irrevocably fucked. I won’t say whether or not the game’s recommended solutions are correct, but it would at least get a candidate thinking about the long term and realizing they need to do something. A century from now, people can remember us as the generation who saved the world, or the ones who ruined it. And that’s me being an optimist and assuming there will still be people to remember us to begin with.
Suzerain
If I could only put one entry on this list, Suzerain would be it. Admittedly, I can’t call it a realistic simulation. In fact, despite the superficial resemblance to a strategy game, at its core the game is a visual novel. But in favoring narrative over mechanical complexity, the game serves as a decent preview of how one would handle the stresses of the Presidency.
There are many choices in which the player, as President of Sordland, must make policy decisions, and there’s an obvious benefit in seeing how a candidate handles those. But the more personal side of the game would be just as revealing. How will you, as President, comfort the nation following a tragedy? What will you do when a scandal rocks your administration? How do you react when a diplomatic incident occurs with a hostile nation? When protesters take to the streets demanding change? When members of your own party turn against you? When you realize that no matter what you do, countless will remember you as a villain? How do you balance your responsibilities as President with those as a husband and father? When forced to choose, who comes first between your country and your family?
And most importantly, will you be nice to your limo driver? I won’t vote for you if you’re not. I’m not kidding.
This War of Mine
Who was the best peacetime President? Trick question: There aren’t any. So far every single one, from George Washington to Joe Biden, has presided over some kind of conflict. Even William Henry Harrison got to spend his month as Commander in Chief during the Second Seminole War.
I’m not going to list any games for winning wars because the military develops plenty of those already and the President doesn’t need me telling them to type “there is no cow level.” But maybe a game can remind you not to get involved in a war if you can help it. Maybe if the President has to manage a group of civilians trying to survive in a city under siege, they’ll do their best afterwards to prevent forcing anyone into that scenario in reality. It sounds naive as I say it, but clearly not playing video games hasn’t really helped stop conflict in the world. I say we try it.
Victoria 3
Really any Paradox grand strategy game would be good for this, and it took a lot of restraint to not just list them all, but I think Victoria would be the most revealing for a candidate to play.
Part of the reason why is its emphasis on economics and internal politics compared to its sister titles. If a candidate played it, we’d be able to see what kind of laws they would pass, what interest groups they’d please and anger, and where exactly they’d fall on the political spectrum by 19th-century standards. Granted a lot has changed since this game’s timeframe and I think we’ve all decided women’s suffrage and child labor laws are good, but it still pays to have some extra assurance the next President agrees.
But most importantly, this one lets you play as America. Not the global superpower it is today, but the fledgling nation that, to put it mildly, still has a lot of mistakes ahead of it. Seeing what a person does as President in a particularly conflicted past would give some idea of how they’d handle the job in the future. In an American game of Victoria 3, the player doesn’t even get a year in before they’re confronted with the Indian Removal Act and Trail of Tears. Will they prevent it, or at least mitigate the worst of it, or will they let the atrocities play out as in reality? The United States does not yet extend coast to coast. Will you stay where you are or invade Mexico and countless Native tribes to head west? Oh, and you still have slavery and a brewing Civil War ahead of you. Have fun.
