The 2008 presidential race has turned me from a casual politics fan into a hardcore nerd for elections, congressional districts and polls. It’s been an amazing process to watch over the past couple of months, and one of the more interesting things is that it has spawned some pretty fun games.
In previous posts, we talked about the Redistricting Game, a persuasive game that shows the difficulty in rearranging the electoral map for a state. We mentioned eLection, a free online game that simulates the presidential process from announcement to the primaries and finally to the general election.
Now we add another political game to the list — PoliQuiz. It’s a quiz game that tests your knowledge of politics. Questions range from the easy — What famous lawyer wrote the “Star Spangled Banner” (Francis Scott Keys) — to mundane difficult ones like Ron Lewis is a Republican Representative from the state of__________. (It’s Kentucky.)
You can try the game out above or go here. Political trivia buffs can even offer new questions. Right now, I’m at the bottom of the leaderboards, but hopefully, I can move to the top.
A) the longest grip fall
B) marathon aka run the whole map and
C) master every combo in the game.
If I had my vote — and I did — I’d pick marathon because it seems like the easiest one to get. I’m lazy. I don’t want to work hard for my achievements. If there was a game that would give me a full thousand just for pressing start, I’d pick that game up without a thought. I am that lazy.
So c’mon voters. Pick the achievement that requires the least effort because you know you’re going to play this game.
Everywhere I look nowadays, I see Democratic Presidentional Nominee Sen. Barack Obama. He’s on the television. He’s on street signs. If you check the Internet, he’s all over that. But what about video games?
Well, I was playing Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law and that juror, right over there. He kind of stands out a bit. Upon closer inspection, he does look pretty familiar …
There’s a new study out that says the red team beats the blue team when it comes to online multiplayer games. I’m not making this up. This is in the Associated Press.
Apparently, some folks at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark had time to analyze “1,347 matchups between elite teams playing Unreal Tournament 2004,” the story says.
If you look at these through a political perspective, these becomes obvious. I mean come on. Red vs. Blue? Republicans vs. Democrats? When it comes to online gaming, the party of the NRA, hunting and gun-toting crazies obviously have an advantage. They’ve fired rifles before. Meanwhile, the blue (Democratic) team, eh, not so much experience with guns.
If you’re tired of killing Nazis or hunting down aliens on a space station, there’s a different world of games out there. Some call it Persuasive games, others calls it games for change but what they all have in common is the goal of inciting action or increasing awareness about a real life issue. Citizen Gamer on MSNBC has a great roundup of these games, discussing the how the genre does and doesn’t work.
Some of the more interesting titles is Hush, where you play a Tutsi mother from Rwanda trying to keep her baby quiet so death squads won’t catch them. Then there’s Execution . Pictured above is ICED, a game about our immigration policy.
Back in the old days, the very old days, book burnings were the method of choice for silencing ideas deemed culturally inappropriate. Rather than embracing freedom of ideas and expression, or even trying to solve the root of the problem rather than blaming the books, people would just throw all the books in a big public pile and burn them.
It was a favored tactic of the Spanish Inquisition and the Nazis because it was such a public spectacle that it intimidated opponents into falling in line. And if it didn’t, in the words of German writer Heinrich Heine, “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.”
But that sort of thing doesn’t happen in the United States anymore, right? It’s limited to places like Iran where there is no first amendment. We’re far more socially advanced than that.
You would think so.
According to GamePolitics, Newport News, VA pastor Rev. Richard Patrick is planning a public game burning. Like comic books in 1948, it’s that newfangled entertainment that’s causing all the crime.
Of course Rev. Patrick could try to tackle the socioeconomic problems that make kids turn to crime and violence but that would apparently take way too much time and energy. It’s easier to find a good scapegoat and burn it. Then all the city’s problems will be solved! Or it will make them all look like backwards reactionaries using a barbaric and un-American tactic to solve a complex, multi-faceted problem. One or the other.
So what do you think President Bush will do after seven months? This game by 2DPlay has the answer. He’s going to sell hot dogs! Hot Dog Bush has the gameplay of quick click titles like Diner Dash and it has a sense of humor to boot. It’s fun times.
Conservative blogger Ben Domenech takes a shot at the presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama in the Examiner. The problem? For all his connection with young voters, Obama is out of step with them when it comes to video games.
Apparently, Domenench, the founder of RedState blog, says “Obama’s remarks don’t come from out of the blue – they’re just the latest in a series of steps that set up video games as an opportunity for him to bolster his “values” street cred for a general election.”
It’s an interesting read. I agree on some of his points. First and for most is that Obama doesn’t know much about video games. It’s outside his field of expertise, but then again, there are lot of politicians like that. Second, video games are a political strawman. Third, I wish there was a gamer voting bloc.
We all know Jack Thompson. None of us like him. Many of us, myself included, cheered when the Florida Bar Association filed a complaint against him. But, somehow, I never quite managed to grasp the full extent of how crazy Jack Thompson is.
Turns out he’s pretty crazy. Guilty of 27 various charges crazy, according to Judge Dava Tunis. Here are some key quotes from the Ars Technica report of the verdict.
These are not small offenses, as Judge Tunis recommended a guilty verdict for, among other things, “knowingly making a false statement of material fact or law to a tribunal,” “using means that have no purpose other than to embarrass, delay, or burden a third person,” “engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation,” and “making statements that the lawyer knows to be false or with reckless disregard as to the truth or falsity concerning to the qualifications or integrity of a judge.”
It’s hard to take Thompson’s communications with the courts, the press, or government officials seriously at this point. Thompson has included gay pornography in his court filings, causing the Judge presiding over the case to note that “Mr. Thompson made available for unlimited public viewing, on the court’s docketing system, these graphic images.” In this most recent case, Thompson created a picture book in reaction to “the court’s inability to comprehend” what he was saying. The book contained pictures of swastikas, a copied dollar bill, monkeys, and, in a surreal touch, a handprint with the word “slap” written under it. That’s leaving out the cartoon squirrels. Earlier this year, Thompson asked why another gaming writer doesn’t “just molest children directly rather than through Rockstar. It would be more personal that way.”
Maybe this will finally stop cable news networks from bringing this clearly unbalanced man on air as an expert on video game violence. Today is truly a great day in the fight against ill-informed reactionaries.
Little Dalton Hatfield must really like Hillary Rodham Clinton. It’s either that or he’s angling real early for his own presidential run and will call in a favor.
According to the L.A. Times, the 11-year-old gave Clinton’s campaign a check for $440. Where did he get his money? Apparently, Hatfield said he sold “his video games (talk about commitment!), bicycle and anything else ‘I could make money with.’ ”
I’m thinking that he’ll be missing that Pokemon some time next week.
