As we move ever closer to Nov. 4, pundits constantly complain that the presidential campaign has become a farce of scorekeeping — with the candidates, media and consultants treating it merely as a horse race. Why aren’t we talking about issues? they moan. Isn’t democracy supposed to be about more than just pandering to the crowd?

In one sense, the pundits are completely right. There’s something enormously depressing about watching the electioneering devolve into such nanoscale pettiness as the “lipstick on a pig” argument, or the choruses of “drill, baby, drill.” We’re facing down some of the hugest social crises in a generation — climate change, a worldwide economic meltdown — yet we’re faced with campaigns dominated by who’s racking up more daily points: Who attacked? Who deflected? Modern political campaigns even borrow directly from the linguistics of game-playing: The candidates are engaged in a “horse race.”

But let me suggest another way to look at it. Maybe American democracy really is a game — and maybe that’s the best thing about it.

What, after all, is a game? A game is a set of rules that gives players a set of goals but also constrains their behavior in striving for those goals; it architects their behavior in an interesting and hopefully enjoyable way. A really well-designed game is “balanced” and self-correcting. In a game of pool, for example, if you take an early lead by sinking a ton of balls, you quickly discover that — whoops — the game gets harder because your opponents’ balls block all your shots. In MMOs like World of Warcraft, different classes of players do different things; as a result, no one class can run roughshod over all others.

In comparison, what’s a democracy? Much like a game, it’s just a bunch of rules — written down on a piece of paper (er, a “constitution”) — that constrain everyone’s behavior in an attempt to architect a productive, happy and peaceful polity. And, again like a game, if it’s well-designed, it’s self-correcting.

One reason to admire the U.S. democratic system is its neat balance of power. On paper, anyway, the branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial — are co-equal, so each can prevent the others from causing too much mischief. When it comes to elections, some sparsely populated states were weighted higher — given extra senators and congressmen or Electoral College votes so that, again in theory, they wouldn’t be run roughshod over. American democracy is strikingly gamelike in its design.

Yet the thing is, the game is clearly in need of a redesign. When you play Political Machine, you quickly realize — much as real-world candidates do — that you’re mostly worried about the small handful of vote-rich “swing” states, like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. I won even though I almost completely ignored population-rich New York, California and Texas.

This is, of course, because of the superweird Electoral College system. It’s a design choice that made a lot of sense 200 years ago, but makes increasingly less sense as time goes on and America becomes more of an urban, coastal country. The software of American democracy was designed to run on hardware — a particular population distribution — that no longer exists.

If American democracy actually were a game, like Halo, players would call it unbalanced — and cry out for a solution. Or to put it another way: The software of U.S. democracy needs a patch. It needs some tweaks that force politicians to consider the whole map.

Plenty of electoral thinkers have suggested reweighting the Electoral College, or maybe even scrapping it. Assuming this were politically possible, it would require some sober meditation on design. For example, to ensure that low-population states don’t get completely overlooked politically in the new regime, you might want to include new safeguards for them — such as a couple extra senators or representatives.

Even so, you’d want to be very, very careful as you proceeded. As any videogame designer knows, changing even one tiny part of a system — making the rifles more lethal in Call of Duty, or gravity slightly more powerful in a racing game — can send the entire thing spiraling into chaos. The same goes with democracy, in spades.

But the point is, thinking about American democracy as a game is not necessarily a bad thing. Quite the contrary: It might be the best way to fix it.