Note that the game gets more difficult as the real-life October 25th NZ voter enrollment deadline approaches. You'll start with less time, or even fail instantly if you play after the deadline. Just like in the real-life game known as democracy.
This post details my inspirations and intent, and spoils what happens in the game. If you care about that, then play it first (0-10 minutes). This is your last SPOILER WARNING.
Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, there's been a bit of newsworthy alarm about the low rate of voter enrollment among 18-24 year olds. Many young people are depressed about having no future here, but it probably won't get better for them unless they form a voting bloc and elect a government to serve them.
So this game is about embodying two key numbers:
- 166,746: the number of unenrolled 18-24 year old NZ voters (as of 30 Sept 2026)
- 25: the day in October when 2026 voter enrollment will close.
These numbers are both big and far away, which is difficult to conceptualize. It's hard to feel any urgency or connection to these numbers. But maybe this is where game design can help, at least a little.
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| Cookie Clicker (2013) |
Clickers / idle games / incremental games are about clicking buttons to make numbers go up, and then building synergies to make those numbers go up faster, until those numbers are unimaginably huge.
The genre's power is in the dynamic sense of scale. When you first start playing, clicking on a button to get +1 point feels pretty slow, and a goal of 166,746 feels impossibly huge! If you keep at it though, eventually you reach the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands... your sense of numeric scale changes and your hopes increase. (166,746 is actually a very small number in this genre.)
And that's all sorta how this NZ voter enrollment drive could play out. On 31 August 2026, there were about 188,000 unenrolled voters. Then a month later on 30 September 2026, that number was 166,746. It took a month just to make ~10% progress! And now we have less than a month for the other 90%?
It's an impossible goal... Until maybe, suddenly, it's less impossible.
Much like any other clicker game, this game is about clicking increasingly powerful buttons:
- You start with the basic "Enrol" button to click repeatedly to gain a small amount of enrols. More clicks level-up this button to give more enrols but at a shallow curve.
- (NOTE: since this is a game for a NZ audience, I use the
incorrectlocal single-L spelling of "enroll.") - Once you enrol 69+ voters, you unlock a "Friends" button to gain enrols automatically at a slow rate. More friends = faster and bigger passive auto-enrollment. Thus, recruiting Friends is eventually much faster than you acting alone.
- After enrolling 420+ voters, you unlock a "Life & Shit" button. You start with no Life, but as you build up your Shit, it automatically levels your Enrol button. Don't wait for Friends to do all the work! Get your life and shit together!
- Then at 4200+ voters you unlock the final "Hope" button. More Hope automatically levels your Friends. But if you neglect it, "hopelessness" poisons your voter count. Thus, you must cultivate Hope as a strategy, or else hopelessness will undo your accomplishments.
And that's it. It's not complicated. You could even finish the game without thinking, by mindlessly multi-tapping all the buttons all at once, since none of the buttons have any resource cost.
I wanted the game to be approachable for a wide audience, so that meant making it short and forgiving, especially for non-gamers who might not be familiar with the genre at all.
But if we're gonna talk genre, old game studies academics would classify this more as a "serious game", a game made for a purpose other than entertainment. More specifically this is a "newsgame", a type of serious game about current events and issues.
To me, what's most interesting about newsgames is that they're made to be disposable, to churn with the rest of the news cycle, by design. (See my previous newsgame "Don't Rank Cuomo" which "churned" after a few days.)
But gamers abhor games expiring. From the Stop Killing Games consumer rights campaign, to dead MMOs and canceled live service games -- we see expiration as failure. The default ideal state of a video game is immortality.
Here the newsgame is surprisingly radical, it dares to ask: if no one cares about the news / the game anymore, then is it still alive / worth making? Like by this measure, 99.99% of all games on Steam and App Store are dead anyway. We might as well embrace our inevitable destined death in our designs!
So this game's timer depends on the number of real-life days remaining until 25 October 2026, the voter enrollment deadline here in Aotearoa New Zealand. For example: if you play on October 16 then the timer will begin at 9 in-game days, but if you play on October 24 then you'll only have 1 in-game day. Hopefully the message is clear: Play the game now, or else it'll be harder! Enrol now, or else enrolling will be harder!
In this way, expiration is a virtue and embodies urgency. If the "IRL game" of voter enrollment expires on a certain day, then the game should expire as well. Here the game grapples honestly with its own stakes. You could say this game takes itself... seriously?
OR: if your video game never dies, can it be said that it was ever alive?
After all, that's sort of what voting is about -- life or death.
***
You can play Up The Vote for free in your web browser, on your phone or computer. However, you will lose instantly if you try to play after midnight on 25 October 2026 in New Zealand time.
If you are a NZ citizen or permanent resident, you can vote, even if you're overseas.
Go to the official NZ government website at VOTE.NZ to enrol or check your status.
It'll take 2 minutes, less time than you spent reading this blog post.
