Jen: Playing Politics Workshop Response

I selected September 12th and Donkey John as my two games to focus on.

1. Do you think the political simulation games you examined would have been "effective" in communicating with people via the Internet?

I think they would have been effective in communicating with people over the internet, yes. September 12th, other than requiring the installation of Shockwave, is very easy to play, requiring only mouse clicks, and Donkey John harks back to the 'old-skool' style of gaming, in particular Game and Watch and of course Donkey Kong. Both of these feature, I feel, would have helped make the games attractive.

2. Was the political message underpinning the political simulation games you examined immediately obvious? If not, were you driven or interested to find out what the game was trying to "say" (apart from the fact that you have to as part of the workshop)?

The games make their point very easily - as soon as you fire the first shot in September 12th, and watch one or more civilians morph into terrorists in front of your eyes, the point of the game is made very clear. The Newsgamming press release linked in Webct says "As you try to kill the terrorists, you will always kill civilians ('collateral damage')." I actually managed to take a few shots without killing civilians, and soon discovered that taking out large buildings could also be done without killing anyone, and was a good way to see who was hiding behind them and possibly approaching your line of fire, but in general, the game's designers were right. It is almost impossible to fire without killing civilians along with terrorists.

One thing I noticed that I thought was very cute, and harkened back to the initial notice that it was a simulation, not a game, was that when you kill the civilian-turned-terrorists, some of their 'corpses' are civilian corpses, not terrorist corpses. In addition, every so often one of the civilian-turned-terrorists will turn back into a civilian. Little details like these are ones that can help sell the game to more people, because the game designers could have not bothered to put them in - but they did anyway.

Donkey John was a little harder to understand, and I think it was only because I read the accompanying interview while I was waiting for Shockwave to download that I understood what it was about. Unlike September 12th, Donkey John is non-intuitive and the gameplay is a lot harder. You require actual coordination to play the game, and I was surprised when, after dying about a total gameplay time of 30 seconds, I was told I had reached a high score. I must confess, however, that if I hadn't read the interview and had just stumbled across it, I probably wouldn't have gone looking for the context as to why it was made - although having been linked the game the person doing the linking almost certainly would have summarised what the game was about, or I wouldn't have clicked the link to the game in the first place. This is probably a symptom of the iGeneration that Tama was talking about a few weeks ago - if it doesn't immediately impact you or yours or isn't something shiny and cool, you're not really interested.

3. If you had to write a political simulation game similar in size and structure to those you examined, (a) what would be the point you were trying to make and (b) how would the game be structured and operate in order to make that point? (Just give a very brief outline).

Not being very politically minded, I don't really know that much about the current political situation and such. I would probably focus on America and their illegal war, and about how they banned press coverage of things like the coffins and tried not to publicise the casualty numbers and such like that. As to the second half of the question, I would want to make the game as simple to play as possible, because complex gameplay would drive potential players away. Perhaps some sort of whackamole-style game where players have to click on coffins as they poke out of holes, with the cursor being a big hammer with the american flag on it, or something, to symbolise the Bush Administration's attempt to hide the truth.