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I watch BBC America and listen to NPR and work at a newspaper. I play video games for fun.

I think that your review of this game is based on a mistaken assumption. What you may have overlooked is that the internet is not static. A webgame can grow with its community of users.

I have been playing this game since it launched, and i am already noticing how the community is having its say. For example, reading user’s comments, I noticed how everyone was excited about games that adressed issues that do not make it to the headlines in the mainstream media. And the creators of the playthenews have clearly reacted as they provided more games that address such issues.

So, while everyone around me was obsessed about a silly performance by the reverent Wright, I had the opportunity to learn in a profound way about crucial conflicts in Africa and Asia.

So, let’s wait before we hold judgment. I feel that this game made me understand the news in a very profound way, and I am excited to see where it is going.

And thanks for your comments/perspective, Eric.

I don’t think you’ve seen all the possible endings, Lum. You can play it center-left and have the game end with your reelection and things generally doing all right. (As opposed to the left path, in which the leftist guerrilla commander defeats you in the election–although that does at least result in the peaceful transfer of power, as the game notes. Center-right and right also have two distinct paths, but neither of them end well.)

I wanted to chime in on the discussion on several points. First to respond to the initial point that this was already done in Hidden Agenda. We have been compared to games like Hidden Agenda and Balance of Power before in relation to our first game PeaceMaker. The sad fact is that you have to go back twenty years to make that comparison. There have been very few games in the interim that bridge gaming and current real world issues. It also seems that in the time-span from when games like that were broadly accepted the mainstream perception of “games” has become so slanted towards orcs and elves that anything that smells of relevance to the real world is now considered “educational software”, but that is a whole separate conversation.

Your description that the advocacy and your opinion is limited to the forums ignores the core idea that the initial interaction is role-playing a leader responding to the news event. There are two portion of the role-playing experience: the “advocacy” portion as you put it or “what should happen”, and the prediction portion of “what will happen”. The former is your ability to push your opinion, and the latter to show how smart you are ( akin to the motivations of gambling, or trivial pursuit ). Yes these are basic gaming conventions, but they drive millions of users to play games like trivial pursuit, all sorts of prediction pools, and most of those don’t even inform you along the way.

As far as abdicating any responsibility to the issues: the creation of one turn ( which is how we view each decision, since they continue after an event occurs in reality ) requires a lot of decisions. What is the core issue related to the event? What is important information to know? Who are the stakeholders? What are possible actions? Who has the ability to affect the situation? All of these decisions are places where bias and the creator’s perspective creeps into the game. Yes it is true that we are trying our best on games that we create to include different views and perspectives as well as possible outcomes, but it is by no means “neutral”. We are limited by our knowledge and perspective just as any journalist is.

We are reaching out to different media partners to create games using our tools. This would allow for very interesting comparisons of the roles and actions presented, and the issues illuminated by say a US source and a Middle East source creating a game around an event in Iraq. Similarly this frees them to be more assertive in their advisor text and feedback text, or at least bring their “content expertise” to bear. We do plan to, as you suggest, open it up to the user created game. At that point anyone can create whatever advocacy perspective they want through the information and the potential courses of action.

Our goal is to use game elements to make the news more interactive. Creating broader engagement and context to what is a headline driven medium. People wanted to feel that PeaceMaker was tied to and constantly being updated to reflect the current situation. To design a game that is created as advocacy for an issue, or as an exploration of an existing power system through a hypothetical environment the challenge of bridging the gaming and real time news industry is unnecessary, but we have chosen to try to find a way to incorporate gaming and a responsiveness to breaking headlines which has presented some unique design challenges.

People wrote to us saying that they learned more in 4 hours of playing PeaceMaker than in years of consuming the news. This is what we are trying to bring to people through Play the News. Whether that understanding comes through the expanded context, the internalization and ability to explore perspectives through role-playing, or the cause and effect relationships, or all of the above that is probably dependant on the individual.

The beauty of the web is that we can try all of the things you have outlined. We can explore how we can integrate the players input into what actions and roles should be represented. Do we do that by creating opportunities for the players to add their ides to a single game? Do we allow them to create completely different games? For us this platform has just been born.