Scroll to the right to view texts and link to images regarding the first two debate re-enactments:

The Great Debate 1: Battlefield Vietnam
The Great Debate 2: Star Wars Jedi Outcast

"The Great Debate" has been featured in an article recently published in "la Repubblica", the major national Italian daily newspaper.

Un po' per gioco un po' per protesta
(To play a game or to protest)
by Pierluigi Casolari
la Repubblica delle Donne
volume 10 n. 452, May 28, 2005
www.dweb.repubblica.it/

The Great Debate 2: Star Wars Jedi Knight Outcast
Joseph DeLappe continues his series of online gaming performances to re-create each of the three 2004 Presidential Debates. The second debate, the "Town Hall Meeting" held in Missouri on Friday, October 8th, is being re-enacted, in its entirety during multiple visits to game servers hosting the online game, "Star Wars: Jedi Knight II, Jedi Outcast". To date, DeLappe has recreated roughly half of this debate over a 4 hour period, starting Sunday, October 10th.(Sorry for the incorrect dates in my most recent email, all this typing makes me buggy!)

(If you own the game, come find me! Look for Bush, or Kerry on the server list the next few evenings prior to the last and final debate in Arizona.)

This game was chosen as it is a relatively polite first person shooter. Servers for this game are generally set up for "light saber" duels as opposed to the general mayhem of a purely shooting style environment. There is also an odd occurrence of a sort of gathering to watch others duel - somewhat similar to the "town hall" style of the most recent presidential debate. For this game, I used three Macintosh G5's, each one connected to the same public game server. Each of the three computers were dedicated, left to right (of course!), to John Kerry, Citizen Questioner and George Bush, respectively. As the debate proceeded, I switched to the appropriate computer to type in the questions and answers for each of the speakers. So far, there have been attacks by other players such as "Ralph Nater"(sic) and "Michael Moore".

The Great Debate 1: Battlefield Vietnam
On Sunday, October 3rd, 2004, artist Joseph DeLappe re-enacted the first, 2004 Presidential Debate between Senator John Kerry and President George Bush in the PC online first person shooter game, "Battlefield Vietnam".

The performance/re-enactment involved typing into "Battlefield Vietnam" online the entire transcript from the first presidential debate. DeLappe switched his profile, or name, during the gameplay from "George Bush" to "John Kerry", as needed, to recreate, through the instant, text messaging system used in the online game, the entire 14,000+ words. The transcript, used in printed form from the NYtimes on the web, were typed into the online gameplay over the course of an eight hour session, visiting multiple game servers in the US and abroad.

" John Kerry" or "George Bush" were randomly assigned by the host servers to either the US, South Vietnamese Army or the NVA(North Vietnamese Army) teams during the numerous online game sessions, each lasting from 2 minutes to 1/2 hour. Each game session featured between 14 and 31 other online gamers. There was much reaction from the other players during the re-enactment: from righteous outrage to genuine political dialogue to being kicked several times from multiple servers. The experience was thoroughly exhausting, truly a monumental effort at absurdist, online political theater.

In the Fall of 2004, I endeavored to reenact each of the three Presidential Debates in various online computer game environments. "The Great Debates" 1, 2 and 3 were performed online in "Battlefield Vietnam", "Starwards Jedi Knight Outcast" and "The Sims Online". The following texts describe each performance event. Culmiatively I typed in over 50,000 characters of text over the roughly 8 hours needed for each piece. Click on the images for further screen documents from each performance.

The Great Debate 3: The Sims Online
Beginning on Thursday, October 14th, Joseph DeLappe started his re-enactment of the third 2004 Presidential Debate. Focused entirely upon "domestic issues", the third and last debate was held in Arizona. DeLappe typed in the entire text from the debate, in character as either "Senator Kerry" or "President Bush" in the "The Sims Online" simulation game.

While the first two debates were created in "first person shooters", "Battlefield Vietnam" and "Star Wars: Jedi Outcast", respectively, the third debate was performed in this unique, simulated online environment. "The Sims Online" was chosen as the virtual communities visitors, homes, businesses and simulated interaction afforded by this game was entirely appropriate considering the "domestic" theme of the last debate. DeLappe spent approximately 7 hours typing in the first 16 pages of the 21 page debate transcript as downloaded from the New York Times. The remainder of the debate will be completed in "The Sims Online" by Tuesday, October 19th.

Along the way, "Senator Kerry" and "George Bush" existed in "The Sims Online" environment, making friends, enemies, sleeping, eating, taking showers and generally functioning as typical characters in the game. All the while, the two candidates recited, via type-in text bubbles over their heads, the actual lines from the debate. Interaction and reaction was intense. Our politically divided nation and international community appear to be well represented in "The Sims Online". Along the way, both Kerry and Bush, generally coexisted with the other sims and both, on separate occasions, were invited to perform wedding ceremonies. Quite often, either of them were kicked from various dwellings or engaged in both confrontational and genuinely serious political dialogue.

This is the last of DeLappe's online performances of the Debates. After election day, he will be performing the acceptance and concessions speeches of the two candidates in a game environment as yet to be announced.