Playing Politics WS (Anli)

I looked at New York Defender and Donkey John.

1. I think that well-written games do get circulated pretty rapidly to a lot of people. As others have written, the interactivity and challenge of games encourages user involvement. Most of the games would load fairly quickly even on 56k dialup so they're not excluding people with a slower system. Donkey John expects a familiarity with the GameBoy interface and the original Donkey Kong game, but this is a reasonable expectation given the demographics of the internet.
However, I still think RPG-type structures are the most useful for giving extended messages - I started playing the Bush Game, mentioned in the Donkey John interview - it was very compelling with a good mix of action and text, and the elevator sequence they used to illustrate Bush's over-spending of the surplus left by Clinton, where the player descends into a Dante-esque hell guarded by Orwellian pigs in suits is very effective. However, these longer types of games would fail to engage the casual user and people without a good Internet connection.

2. Regarding New York Defender: we all remember watching the news around the time of September 11, and the feelings of vulnerability created by repeated viewings of the planes smashing into the towers. These feelings of frustration are recreated by playing the game, but it's not clear how we should react afterwards. Yes, terrorism is bad and scary, but how should we respond to it? Are the developers making an ironic point about how merely reacting -- shooting down planes during the attack -- is a useless form of defense? Is the game criticising the US's response and earlier foreign policies, or is the enemy simply a faceless and overwhelming foe out to get 'us'? The interpretation of the game is complicated by its apparent non-American origins (the instructions are in French).

In Donkey John, most users would read the extended instructions to find out how the game mechanics work, and along with the instructions is a paragraph about the message of the game. Even if a player didn't read this, the anti-Howard sentiment at least is obvious, and the tiny monetary increments that Xanana earns suggests the immense economic disparity between Australia and East Timor. Also, there is extended information linked to an external website that also gives people something they can actually do about the political situation. Players in the high scores also seem to be giving URLs to socialist and progressive sites.

3. I would like to make a game where the player controls the character of a young German person during the Third Reich, where the player had to contend with the pressures of Hitler's popularity -- reflected in the pro-Nazi stance of the player character's (PC's) family and community conflicting with the player's knowledge of the inevitable outcome. The PC would have a choice to either enlist or to join a resistance movement. The former choice will force the PC to perform morally objectionable tasks such as overseeing a concentration/death camp, arresting Jews/gypsies/homosexuals/rebellious characters, whilst the latter will eventually lead to the PC getting arrested (preferably by a character earlier on identified as the PC's childhood friend) and executed/sent to a concentration camp. This game would be targeted mostly at highschool students learning about the Nazi regime and the pressures of conformity. I would like to include a scene where, if the PC chose to join the White Rose (or similar resistance movement), the PC would have a choice to either betray (his) friends or die horribly. This game would be much larger and longer than the games we studied... and actually now that I think about it, I'm not sure if it could be classified so much as 'political'. Oh well ^^;;