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• Campus Politico notes that there is a large drop-off of voting among young people in down-ballot races. Matt Stoller at Open Left lets us know that the Obama campaign is hoping to change that. He posts a copyof an Obama campaign email reminding him to vote down ballot.
• Pew Research provides a preview of how exit polling will be conducted on Tuesday, and how early voting and an influx of new voters will be factored into those polls. Good reading for those who will be looking at the numbers on E-Day.
• The website for The Youngest Candidate, an excellent film that follows four 18 year-olds as they run for public office, is now live. It's got some great design work done by Shepard Fairey
• Tim Fernholz at Tapped thinks that campgain widgets like the Obama tax calculator are the future of issue campaigning.
• The folks at Overdetermined, a new blog about data analysis, have some pre-election gallows humor:

• The whack jobs at Human Events detail the "pernicious effects" of voter registration drives on American civic life. Ooh scary.
• Obama's in-game X Box ads cost $44,000. Chump change when you raise $150m in one month.
• Mobilize.org spotlights a new report on college affordability.
• Here's a late entry - Al Gore's address to the Power Vote coalition. My gut says this was probably very motivating to the diehards in the coalition who are doing GOTV and signing people up to take the Power Vote pledge. I found it a little dry coming after Obama's program last night, but I was glad to see Gore speak positively about youth involvement rather than advocating for ineffective strategies from his youth:

Your Saturday afternoon reading.

• Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics and Professor of Politics, makes a YouTube video for students, advising them on why and how to get involved in the 2008 election:
  
• Record voter registration in Michigan (with the college town counties forming the list of top five counties with the largest number of new registered voters).
• Florida A&M celebrates the start of early voting in Florida in a big way: one thousand faculty, students, and staff, led by the president, cast votes.
• The GOP must have missed the memo: voter suppression isn't "in" this election cycle. Sorry.
• Rock the Vote prepares for the youth vote tsunami.
• Ypulse, partnering with Alex Steed on his tour across America to meet and talk with other young activists, has a post regarding conversations with young Millennial business leaders engaging in socially responsible business practices.
• Voting on the weekend? An op-ed in the Times explores the benefits of holding two election days -- on Saturday and Sunday -- the first weekend of November.
• A global consensus: 90 percent of youth around the world want to see action taken on climate change.
• A new round of polling of gamers on Xbox Live yields a predictable result: their top concern is jobs and the economy.
• Sarah wrote about Generation We this week, the new site with a plethora of data on Millennials and a free copy of the book by Eric Greenberg. It's Getting Hot in Here has more coverage.
• A great piece by Adrian Talbott on Millennials' engagement thus far this election cycle at Huffington Post.

As Game Politics broke last week, and Gigaom confirmed yesterday, Barack Obama is buying in-game advertising on X-box Live. The ads are photo-realistic and announce the start of early voting and promote Vote for Change, Obama's one-stop-shop for registration and voting information.

So far, the ads are appearing in the following games:

• Burnout Paradise
• Madden 09
• Nascar 09
• NBA Live 08
• Need for Speed Carbon
• Need for Speed Prostreet
• NFL on Tour
• NHL 09
• Skate

According to the Seattle Times, the ads were sold by Massive, a Microsoft-owned ad agency (Microsoft makes the X-box, for the non-gamers here). The ads are also highly targeted and are only visible to gamers in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin.

There's no word as to how much these ads are costing or whether or not the Obama campaign pursued similar deals with PlayStation or Nintendo. I spent a good chunk of time yesterday trying to get someone at the Obama campaign to answer some basic questions, but ran into the PR wall. Here's all that the campaign is saying:

"Voters have a clear choice between Barack Obama and the change we need, or John McCain and more of the same failed Bush policies. These ads will help us expand the reach of VoteforChange.com, so that more people can use this easy tool to find their early vote location and make sure their voice is heard."

Over at ePolitics, Colin Delaney is skeptical about the efficacy of such ads:

Now let’s be realistic: these ads are in the middle of a racing game and are going to blow right by players, though they must be up long enough to register if people are going to bother paying for them. And they’re aimed at a shiftless-young-male demographic notoriously resistant to political messages, unless delivered by the Swedish Bikini Team. But thinking about it, the Obamans have probably bought about as many battleground-state TV commercials as they possibly could by now, so why not try using games to try to break through? What do you possibly risk? They certainly have the cash.

More broadly, this tactic reminded me of what folks from the abortive Mark Warner presidential campaign said a couple of years ago about his appearance in Second Life: very few people actually saw Warner there, but many more talked about it, and they talked about it on tech sites and gaming sites that are normally tough to break into. In the case of Obama’s gaming ads, besides the usual political suspects, they’ve now been covered in tech blogs, gaming sites AND car sites like this one. Multiplier effect!

I'm much more optimistic about this. Yes, it's true, that racing games like Burnout Paradise and Grand Turismo might not make the best vehicles for these ads, but sporting games offer much less hectic game play where ads could be more visible. Imagine little cartoon Obama ads in Wii tennis. Or imagine playing Gears of War II and seeing a faded-out, ravaged Shepard Fairey poster of Obama on the wall of a shelled-out building. . .

I also grate against the Second Life comparison. I was never on the Second Life bandwagon for a lot of reasons - janky interface, absolutely nothing interesting to do except attack people with penises, and lack of critical mass of users being some of the biggest. Above all, Second Life was a dead end. You could walk around a virtual campaign office, but you couldn't do anything. You had to leave Second Life if you wanted to take action. None of these are the case with XBox Live.

With users numbering in the millions, XBox Live certainly has the critical mass of active users to make such advertising attractive. In comparison, Second Life never had more than a few thousand active users at any given time. And thanks to their partnership with Rock the Vote, it's possible for any XBox Live user to actually start the registration process right on their XBox. As more states like California and Arizona pass laws allowing complete online voter registration, it's going to be possible to go from seeing one of these in-game ads to registering to vote before you put down the controller for the night.

The opportunities for reaching an audience and inspiring action are even greater on a platform like Nintendo Wii, which has a much more social element to its games than PlayStation or XBox. Imagine hosting a dinner party and busting out the Wii to play some tennis or Dance Dance Revolution, and seeing an in-game ad. We know that peer to peer is the surest way to get someone to register and then vote. So maybe one person at the party then asks if everyone is registered to vote. Those who aren't face some intense peer pressure, and with online registration through the console, everyone can register to vote right then and there. We aren't too far off from being able to do that and this is one of the first steps towards getting there.

Most of all, what I like about this ad buy, is that it shows some cultural respect for a growing and important constituency: gamers.

We know that all the stereotypes about gamers are false. Video games don't cause violence, and violence among youth has declined since the advent of games like Mortal Kombat and Halo. We know that young gamers are not civically challenged introverts, but are just as likely to vote as any other young person. And we know that most gamers aren't even teenagers. By PEW's reckoning, 35% of adults play video games, and the average age of a gamer is 33 years old.

Despite that, the Democratic Party of the last 15 years is rife with politicians who have used gamers and violent video games as their own personal Sista Souljah to navigate the culture war and appeal to "the center." It is in part thanks to Holy Joe Lieberman's crusades against video games, and the well-intentioned but misguided efforts of Tipper Gore and Hillary Clinton to regulate video games, that gamers are now an oft-maligned constituency in America, more likely associated with Columbine than with civic participation.

In reality, gamers are be a valuable, and sizeable, constituency to be courted by politicians on both sides of the aisle. What the Obama campaign is doing with this ad-buy is reaching out a hand to recognize gamers as an important piece of American culture and a group that needs - and deserves - to be brought into the public debate. That's what I love most about this move by the Obama campaign. It shows a cultural fluency with 21st Century American life that most politicians lack, and a willingness to reach out to all Americans in the places they live and socialize. I can't wait until the campaign is over and we can get some real data on what this cost and how effective it was. I think this is just scratching the surface of something that will grow to become a common occurrence in politics.

Hold onto your hats. Every link today is pure youthy awesomeness and should be read. In no particular order, but with extra commentary:

• Conservative reporter Carl Cannon, writing at conservative outlet Reader's Digest, reports that pollsters are probably underestimating the youth vote this year.
• The LA Times reports that Obama wins the Xbox/Rock the vote primary, but wonders if young gamers will actually vote. As we know from the recent Pew study, the answer is yes.
• Our own Sarah Burris has an excellent piece over at WireTap grading the RNC and the DNC for their inclusion of youth. It's comprehensive and enlightening and unexpected to see where each convention excelled and where they inevitably fell short.
• There is a lot of chatter lately among youth organizers about finding ways to reach high school students. One answer may be Channel One, the news/advertising network played in so many homerooms across the country. The channel recently launched One Vote 2008 to cover the elections. Now if we could only get our folks in front of their cameras . . .
• Youth Vote '08 covers the launch of Generation WE, a new study on Millennials. We'll have more about this in the coming days.
• In the Washingtonian, Garrett Graff thinks that Millennials will cost McCain the election.
• Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising is now available for download.
• Rock the Vote's new poll gets some coverage from UPI and The Nation.
• In cooperation with PayPal, MySpace deploys a new system to raise money for nonprofits through its network.