Ahead of the general elections 2014, mobile games on the name of BJP’s prime-ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi are becoming popular among the kids.
The new era of advertising which had introduced a whole new range of merchandise, are being doled out by the big parties to stay afresh in the social psyche to gain political momentum. Android games are the new attraction, available free of cost on smart phones with the target audience being the young voters.
According to sources, these moves are well calculated by the political parties, as they believe that young voters and children who are not able to participate directly in the electoral process can at least convince their parents to vote for their favorite candidates. Hence, besides organising mammoth political rallies and doing door to door canvassing, most political parties are relying on the virtual world to leave a mark on the collective conscience to gain political momentum.
There are more than two dozen android games designed on Narendra Modi namely ‘Modi Hill Climb’, ‘Modi Hill climb Race’, ‘Modi Express’ and ‘Modi-3’ etc. Similarly games like ‘Rahul Gandhi Run’ and ‘Ask Rahul’ are out there, to endorse the scion of the Gandhi family as the future prime minister of India.
The range of games are puzzle games, brick game and memory game. Also there are certain games in which the competition between Modi and Rahul Gandi has been shown as ‘Modi v/s Rahul’, ‘Modi Rahul Fly’, ‘PM Race’ and ‘PM 2014’.
Racing games have been designed for the kids, where they can pick up their favorite political character and race for the chair of Prime Minister by crossing different hurdles which pops up in their way. The winner of the race who can complete a stage successfully by crossing all the hurdles get to sit on the chair and turns out to be the winner.
In the introduction of some of the games it has been clearly mentioned the description that “Narendra Modi or Namo is the 14th and current Chief Minister of the State of Gujarat, representing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He is the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance for the upcoming 2014 Indian general elections. Show your support to Narendra Modi, run and play this Namo game in your mobile phone. Rahul Gandhi will most likely run into NaMo lion brigade and supporters in the coming India election”.
One of the games named as the ‘PM race’ contains three characters, Arvind Kejriwal, Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi and to support for a favorite PM candidate as person will have to select either of the three candidates and will have to catch Votes for them while gaming.
If mistakenly a player crashes with a street light or catches opponent’s party symbol then game will get over for that player. The number of votes collected successfully will be added for the final tally of declaring a winning candidate.
This shows how the parties are trying to levy the hegemony of their candidate on the social psyche through android games, which is an innovative method of campaigning ahead of the general elections.