Political Beer Pong Proposal and Rationale

Rational

Since doing Study Task 4 in OUGD505 I realised how uninformed students are on the subject of politics, and was surprised by how few people planned on voting in the general election. I was initially planning on re-designing this Operation Black Vote campaign for the reasons explained in that post, but after doing the study task I felt that this was a more relatable issue.

It's still a relevant issue to the essay question as the campaign the government ran on getting people to get people to register was based on fear (as shown below) albeit in a slightly satirical manner.



While the government has clearly made an attempt to try and remove the seriousness from politics and make it a bit more fun, it doesn't go far enough to really have some weight behind it. Not only this, but it doesn't provide any information about any of the parties to give people an indication of who they should vote for.

After seeing how well political subversions of pokemon cards worked as shown by the amount of time I, and the people I showed them too spent reading them, I wanted to try and replicate this comedic way of presenting information in a way that would be accessible to students and distributed physically to them for free.

Proposal

In my first hand experience as a student, whenever you want a pack of cards, no-one has one, this is a basis I worked on fairly successfully in OUGD504. Cheaply making a political Beer Pong "kit" that could be given out for free in Freshers packs would provide students with something they could have fun with that subconsciously adds positive connotations of fun and sociality to politics.

The "kit" would simply be 2 lots of 6 plastic cups, each of the 6 cups would be a different colour to represent different parties, and would have a photograph of the leader of the party on the front, with some of their policies that are beneficial to students on the back.

Keeping the political content to a minimum is required to make sure it's not contradictory to the fun nature of what I'm trying to produce. Whilst playing the game people obviously wouldn't read the policies, but when it's being set up or tidied away the person doing it may take a couple of seconds to read the policies, which would then spark their curiosity to make them look into it further.