Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Get Your Campaign Game On

A quick overview of Internet content relating to the campaign

Seeing as the election is quickly approaching, we thought it’d be prudent to list a few of the more popular sites that deal with Internet content related to the 2004 campaign.

There has been buzz about Persuasive Games recently. The company initially gained fame for their Dean for America game sponsored by – what else – Dean for America.

Hoowever, much greater recent interest has been from their two new releases: Take Back Illinois and Activism. Both of these games focus on using resources in order to get constituents active in their political climate. Both games are worth checking out, especially considering their funding.

While both developed by Persuasive Games, Activism was funded by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Take Back Illinois by the Illinois House Republican Committee.

Persuasive Games is run by Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, the same people who run Water Cooler Games, a blog that looks at games in the context of politics, advertising, and advocacy. Worth a look, especially in relation to Lightspin.

Newsgaming is also worth looking at for your political gaming needs. While less active than Persuasive, Newsgaming does feature September 12th which, after its release September 2003, helped kick start the trend of more political games.

The Political Machine is a popular election game that lets you run a political campaign against either computers or other opponents on-line. In fact, it’s one of few main-stream election games offered in a retail market.

Previously mentioned on Lightspin before – is Lunagames’ Election 2004. Although similar to The Political Machine, Election 2004 is simpler and lacks human against human play. However, being a game for cell-phones, it is worth noting that it lets you take the election on the go.

If running a campaign is too much of a hassle, there’s also Bush vs. Kerry Boxing from Sorrent. This cell-phone game allows players to box against various political figures from both sides of the campaign.

Naturally, not all the games are developed outside the parties.

As previously mentioned on Lightspin there are also the Kerry Corner and George W. Bush sites which feature games funded and created by the Republican party.

And, also mentioned, is Dem TV which takes the Democrat side to the games.

Although this isn’t all the content, these selections show the spectrum of what’s available out there and should give you a sampling.

After you get your taste of what’s out there, come back later for part two on what the critical side of the electronic entertainment campaign movement.

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