Why Election Run?

It's reasonable to ask why someone who isn't an artist, isn't a a programmer, and who doesn't follow politics that closely would make a game about running for election.

Election Run® began as a superhero-themed real world phsyical card game, which I made a copy of in 2019. The origins of the impulse remain a mystery but were probably rooted in a mix of factors: playing video games such as Firaxis's XCOM series, making games as a kid, playing tabletop D&D (Wizards of the Coast), a hunch there might be demand for something along those lines, and some of the darker takes of the supe genre from Alan Moore's Watchmen (DC) to Garth Ennis's The Boys (Wildstorm/Dynamite), both brought to the screen with aplomb in the last 15 years.

At the time I wasn't aware of any others – intriguingly it was before Marvel and Firaxis had announced the Marvel Midnight Suns game so I was maybe onto something - and it seemed like it might work.

So I bought a printer, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee (Titan Books) , some things to try to draw with, and got to work.

Super Duel Card League™ was born, as was a cast of characters of varying originality and artistic merit. I printed off one copy, played it a couple of times, and emailed a printers to ask how much it would cost to do a run.

By now it was the throes of the first year of the pandemic and they didn't reply. I got the feeling they might not have replied even outside the midst of a global crisis.

Undeterred, I set the supes aside and started work on another set of characters, though from a different genre and with a different game in mind.

The order of events is muddled in my memory but I can more or less piece them together from file dates, and so I surmise I must have moved straight onto the next, and third, set of characters, this time turning to politics with a game called Election Run, or Election Night in mind. The latter name sounded sharper but I registered the first as a trademark because it was what the game was going to be about. Having looked it up online just now, I also see "Election Night" was the name of a film released in 2021, although a completely separate project and one I was unaware of until my search a few minutes ago.

Soon the trademark was registered and the game was now Election Run®.

Having taken more time over my previous characters, sketching in pencil, penning the outline digitally, then shading and tinkering, by now I realised I could blast through them quickly if I kept it more simple. The end results, as people will see, were a mixed bag, with some wonky mouths and at least one swan or even giraffe neck, but on the whole they did the job. I used a DIY random table to decide facial expressions and gaze direction, and half-remember randomly generating other features too, using written tables and rolling dice. Some stock background texture lines from the Affinity Designer Christi's Comix pack.

With the visual side of things straightforward enough to sort, I read up on some basic web design: HTML, CSS and JavaScript, learning enough to make a page react more or less how I wanted it to, though with some deep mires of being stuck to wade through where things wouldn't work even though they looked like they should, of deleting and starting again, of rebuilding bit by bit to find out where things had gone wrong.

Election Run® in its first form was published online about two years ago, in July 2021. I didn't promote it at all and effectively forgot about it.

Fast forward to spring 2023, and I took redundancy from my job as a local news reporter, where I'd been for about 15 years.

This meant I suddenly had a chance to give it another go, plus other projects besides, and that's what I did. A nagging brood of ideas for games and silly things had been jostling for attention for a while anyway.

So after my last day of employment in early May, I switched off and went into deep hybernation for a few weeks, catching up on some chores, then as the thaw from stasis began, I brushed up on my Stan Lee and JavaScript, although make no pretences about being a code ninja or the like. It's pretty basic, but enough to play around with. (This tale doesn't get much more exciting, so no offence taken for anyone who switches off.)

I began rewriting Election Run® from the ground up, or more accurately from the opening tag down, trying to sharpen the playability and layout, adding rival candidates and actions, a 'TV news channel' with a character table showing how their approval ratings compare week to week. I created four newsreader drawings, ditching two that didn't fit the TV screen layout. The character 'Nigel Normal' was renamed 'Nigel Brittlegill', and a few other names were changed at the last minute. I opted to use 'they' and 'their' because switching between gender-specific pronouns for all of the opposition actions would be too time-consuming. I should really make a better, more thematic logo at some point.

Having been waylaid for a week in a complete quagmire trying to decide a trademarkable company name, I dived back into more trimming and tidying, enduring a few days of some pretty slow, trudging progress through the mud of sorting out some annoying glitches that shouldn't have been there, ultimately finding a few workarounds. I stuck to writing the code myself because I enjoyed it, and haven't resorted to AI, both feeling slightly frustrated with its sudden, startling ascent just as I was making a go of something DIY, both in terms of code and art, and although I have no inclincation to use it as yet, who knows what the future holds. It might be a matter of learning to climb so I can "throw away the ladder".

The finished product is intended to play fast and easy, and easily accessibly for people who aren't inclined towards the usual intense level of commitment required and immersion offered by big gaming titles. People who might have five or 10 minutes to kill on a break at work, or fancy a brief and light-hearted reprieve from drudgery, routine, and the serious stuff of life, as well as people working or with an interest in politics make up what I imagine as the range of people who might dip in. It's short enough to dip in and enjoy or discard – the same people who might have played a certain well-known and compelling word game that's gripped the world's interest in recent years.

I tried to keep it fairly light, swerving anything too dark, grim or shocking, with a handful of eyebrow-raisers thrown in, and instead put the focus on annoying features of modern life, so things such as fly-tipping, litter and trolley-dumping do a lot of the heavy-lifting, with some financial scandal thrown in.

There's no personal grudge with the motivation for the game, and I recognise that lots of people in politics do noble, often thankless work, day in day out and beyond, although some of them less so, particularly in recent years, but I didn't want to make it too timid and tame. Hopefully it strikes a decent balance. The writing could be sharper and the results are a mixed bag but it plays fine enough, with the option to update the decks.

The characters are completely made-up, or they felt like that creating them, referring to random feature generation tables and confined by my evident lack of expertise an illustrator. I'm not sure I could draw someone specific if I tried.

The events likewise aren’t based on specific real world events, although some probably carry the flicker of some half-memory of things absorbed from national and international news, although the 'Gravy Vampire' episode is partly autobiographical from an unsightly pasty-eating mishap on Lord Street in Liverpool city centre and the reference to derelict buildings and road charging clearly resonates with the local patch. The constituency name of Chemerton is invented and very loosely alludes to the location of my home borough of Halton – wedged as it is between the rest of Cheshire and Merseyside – though the exploits of the candidates have no bearing to the real world politics of the patch.

As for the code, the game seems to be playing OK. The main glitches seem to be have been ironed out, and I'm hoping it retains most of its offline speed when played online. If any glitches do arise, such as one of the character pics being missing, or the same character doubling up in two character slots (that shouldn't happen now but who knows), reload the page and start again and thank you for your patience. I make no bones about being an enthusiastic amateur at the start of a road of uncertain direction and duration, as opposed to the hulking legion of a multibillion-pound games studio, and make these tentative early steps into the creative unknown with humility, curiosity and eagerness to give it a go. Watch this space. Hope people enjoy the game.

Oliver Clay, June 29, 2023.

(Edited on October 31, 2023, to update company name and remove relevant section.)