Is Gerrymandering Cheating or Just A Good Strat?
We often talk about American politics as a game, but what kind of game is it exactly?
This is an excellent week if you live in California and love maps! California will be jumping into the redistricting fray with its own special election to counter Texas's attempt to hold onto Republican power in Congress. I know you didn't come here for politics, but as someone who loves games, my ears perked up with all this back-and-forth jockeying over winning a system of governance.
The current debate over gerrymandering is a microcosm of how our government works and is worth thinking through the frame of games. You hear the "politics is just a big game" that's facile and simply means there are two sides with one winner. But let's scratch deeper.
If we accept that American democracy is a type of game, what kind is it? I want to spend less time looking at the "optimal" design for the system or own my progressive politics, but let's look at how games can open our understanding of a game that many of us are playing, whether we like it or not.
Complexity in American Politics
To start, the American system of governance is complex! One way to approach the scale of this complexity is to point to America's size. It's the third largest in the world, so of course, the system should reflect the diversity of its constituents. Another way to approach this is America's history as a slave-holding country that blended democratic and anti-democratic systems with a series of checks and balances that functionally serve as speed bumps or roadblocks to change.
Consider LA, the city that I live in. Rejecting the mayor-driven systems of New York and Chicago, LA is a dizzying patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions that brings me to tears each election day. A typical Angeleno might vote for representatives in over a dozen different governmental bodies—city council, county supervisors, school boards (LAUSD or one of 25+ other districts), community college trustees, water districts, sanitation districts, hospital districts, and various other special districts that handle everything from mosquito control to cemetery management.
These boundaries rarely align: your neighbor across the street might be in a different city council district, a different board might govern your kids' school than the one you vote for, and the boundaries shift every ten years with redistricting. Add in the fact that the City of LA is just one of 88 cities within LA County—each with its own elections—plus unincorporated areas governed directly by the county, and you have an electoral maze where even civic-minded voters struggle to keep track of who represents them and when to vote. Election days are scattered across primary and general elections in even-numbered years, with some special elections and local measures appearing at seemingly random times, creating voter fatigue and ensuring that many of these crucial local positions are decided by a tiny fraction of eligible voters.
So, when we think of American democracy as a system with "rules," we are not looking at the 91 rules of chess. This is more like Twilight Imperium, the space opera board game with 300 ship miniatures, 400 cards, thousands of counters, a 44-page rule book, and a two-day play time. (I was pleasantly reminded of the lovely Onion headline "Explanation Of Board Game Rules Peppered With Reassurances That It Will Be Fun," which could also describe my LA County ballot.)
It can be tempting to conflate complexity with what game theorists call "depth." In a 2017 paper, NYU Game Center Chair Emeritus Frank Lantz and others tried to give a working definition for what we mean by a game being sufficiently deep. Using their analysis as a guide, American politics possesses many characteristics that would suggest an interesting game on its face, but don't hold up under closer inspection.
First, deep games have what's called "state space complexity." This means there are a lot of ways to arrange your game system. But Lantz et al. point out that you can feign this type of depth by simply increasing the space size (e.g., holding more elections, adding more candidates) without making the game deeper.
American politics possesses many characteristics that would suggest an interesting game on its face, but don't hold up under closer inspection.
Second, deep games all have an essential and meaningful number of branching choices. "A game with fewer options to consider would seem to offer less challenge and interest," they write. But again, you can mimic game depth by adding "dud" alternatives—dead ends that present the illusion of choice, but are never viable. Consider that we have the freedom to call our elected representatives, but as the New Yorker's Kathryn Schulz discovered, the impact of calls on our politics is complicated:
When I asked past and present Congress members and high-level staffers if constituent input mattered, all of them emphasized that it absolutely does. But when I asked them to name a time that a legislator had changed his or her vote on the basis of such input, I got, in every instance, a laugh, and then a very long pause.
Third, a deep game requires a lot of "computational resources" such as time or memory. In the case of politics, the simple analogue is money. The American political system has little public funding for elections and requires immense resources from candidates who must raise significant amounts from others or fund campaigns themselves. But simply raising lots of money alone is not a guaranteed path to victory. Democrats spent 36% more on the 2024 election than Republicans and lost every chamber. Lantz et al. use this way of thinking about games that use a lot of resources with meaningful impact:
Searching for a needle in a haystack is a difficult problem (in the sense of being resource intensive) but it’s not the kind of problem that requires cleverness and creativity, the kind of problem that rewards life-long learning and can support a large, long-term community of serious, dedicated players
So in all three cases–state spaces, branching choices, computational resources–American politics presents a complex system that does not generate creative outcomes. It is not a "well-played game," in the words of Bernie DeKoeven.
So what should be happening with depth in games? Lantz et al. introduce a "strategy ladder" and identify three things that truly make a game deep. There should be intermediate strategies that allow for success through randomness or execution, which should improve over time. Adding more resources should enhance your performance. Finally and presciently, there should neither be a resource-intensive only solution nor a quick and easy path to victory.
In theory, American politics should exhibit precisely these qualities. Each advancement in political strategy—from simple door-knocking to micro-targeted digital campaigns to algorithmic redistricting—should be the depth a good political game should embody. But a system allowing incumbent politicians to win 95% of the time isn't a game; it's an arms race. To game designers, that's a big problem:
Consider a game in which a single heuristic allowed you to play perfectly. In such a game you would never need to search the game tree at all; whatever the situation, you would simply apply this one weird trick. This is how a game can fail to support a long strategy ladder by having a simple strategy that exploits an underlying regularity of the game tree to make the problem trivial.
You can probably guess what that one weird trick is. If no changes are made to balance the system, the game becomes "solved" and there's only one path to success. There is no room for generativity as the outcome has been predecided. My personal concern is that the "solution" turns the disenfranchisement dial to 11. And if so, why bother even playing?
I'm not a cheater. I'm a strategist.
Complexity in American politics can also mask fundamental disagreements about the rules themselves. When people do not understand a system's rules, bad actors can take advantage without social consequence. Those that explain a games rules to others have as much power as those who write them. Inevitably, when one side gains a consistent benefit, the knee-jerk reaction is that someone is cheating. This reaction is fair, particularly if one party has unique gifts or talents.
In her landmark book on cheating in video games, appropriately titled Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, Professor Mia Consalvo outlines players' rationale for bending or breaking the rules. As she lays out in her ethnography, the challenge is that there was no single definition for cheating. Some players were complete purists and deemed any use of outside assistance as cheating. Other players were okay with cheating so long as it focused on enhancing personal experience, while others limited their definitions solely to multiplayer environments.
Cheating took on a social dimension: "Cheating was more than breaking a rule or law; it was those instances of bending or reinterpreting rules to the players' advantage," she writes. "Players actively made ethical judgements about gameplay that extended beyond the coded rules of the game."
The challenge for gerrymandering is that there isn't a consensus about what constitutes cheating. Perhaps redrawing maps to the city block for political advantage is cheating, but what about to the neighborhood? What about the county? The region? There isn't a correct answer because there isn't a set definition of what the game "is." J. Barton Bowyer writes that cheating is defined as something done to others: "to cheat, not to play the game that reflected the norm, indicated that there was another world of deception, in which people did not play the game, your game, but their own."
If we accept that cheating is socially negotiated, the question isn't whether or not to cheat, but whether you can convince other players that it's appropriate. The fight over gerrymandering is the point and a sign that maybe both parties agree on the norms for aggressive redistricting. Consalvo writes that this type of discourse is typical for games: "Many players reason that because the developer's code does not specifically prohibit it, it might not be a cheat." As the Supreme Court has opened the door to the most radical versions of gerrymandering, the quest for power necessitates a change in tactics, and what was previously considered cheating is now a shrewd strategy.
"Players actively made ethical judgements about gameplay that extended beyond the coded rules of the game."
In the NY Times Magazine, Jia Lynn Yang outlines how Democrats abandoned an exploitative (but effective!) party boss system and more aggressive uses of executive power, for a more elite-driven, consensus form of governance. The effects have been predictable:
Political scientists and historians have observed that while the modern Republican Party became more ruthless about defeating its political enemies, breaking whatever norms were required, Democrats effectively stood in place, hoping for a return to bipartisan comity and defending the status quo their opponents were smashing. The Democrats became the party of procedure.
“They’re ambivalent about brass knuckles,” said Daniel Schlozman, co-author of “The Hollow Parties” and professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.
The problem is that Democrats haven't acknowledged what the game is, and as a result, are misplaying it. The fight over gerrymandering suggests that change may be on the horizon.
Cheaters vs. Spoil Sports
That said, there is a path beyond cheating. Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga contrasts cheaters and "spoil sports:"
The player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a "spoil-sport". The spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself.
While cheaters may bother us, Huizinga argued that cheaters are less destructive to overall play because they are still operating within the bounds of the game itself. The cheater at least recognizes that the game is important enough to attempt to gain an advantage. His reasoning is counterintuitive but compelling: the cheater still pretends to play the game and maintains the illusion of following the rules, thereby preserving the "magic circle" of play. The cheater wants to win and thus implicitly acknowledges the game's validity.
On the other hand, the spoil-sport completely shatters the play-world by refusing to accept its rules altogether. As Huizinga puts it, the spoil-sport "robs play of its illusion"—literally "in-lusio" or "in-play." The spoil-sport destroys the temporary reality players have agreed to create together by denouncing the game as meaningless or refusing to participate. This is when someone walks away with the ball.
Huizinga notes that communities of players are often more forgiving of cheaters than spoilsports. Cheaters can be ejected, but the game continues; spoilsports threaten the very existence of the play community. Consalvo noted that in one game community, 10% of players actively wanted to destroy the game they were playing, felt validated when developers paid attention to them, and had no remorse for their actions. "That's because they position themselves as customers, and the developer as someone who promised them the ability to modify and customize their gaming experience," she writes.
The understandable anxiety over whether gerrymandering is fair is really a fear of the spoilsport. It is a legitimate fear that the system itself will disappear. Spoilsports love political violence. Spoilsports were at Jan. 6. Spoilsports don't believe gerrymandering is enough, and something more unrestrained attempts to emerge.
Enjoy this essay? Consider supporting Killscreen for the year for more essays, interviews, and profiles on the future of interdisciplinary play.
It's worth noting that Huizinga understood the power of spoilsports. After critiquing the Nazis publicly in 1941 for their influence over Dutch academics, he was interred with nine other professors as collateral damage for an attack by the Dutch resistance in Rotterdam that had killed nine Nazis. Leiden University was closed, and Huizinga was banned from returning. Huddled in a small house with a blown-out window with his wife and young daughter, Huizinga died in detention in De Steeg in Gerderland, near Arnheim, on February 1, 1945, just a few months before the close of the war.
"The spoilsport breaks the magic world," Huizinga wrote. He is a coward and must be ejected." These are strong and sad words, but they remind us why fighting to play the game of politics matters to us all.
Many thanks to Clive Thompson, who planted this seed in my head almost 15 years ago!
