Event at the Capitol Building

This week has been a blur of activity. Today we launched the game out of the Capitol Building. Rep Tanner hosted us. We dressed the room with posters related to the game. Four people spoke: Rep Tanner, me, John Anderson (the former presidential candidate who is now Chair of FairVote.org), and Gerry Hebert (exec director of The Campaign Legal Center). After the speeches we were interviewed by various members of the press including the NY Times, Roll Call, and NPR.

Here are some pictures from the event:

Speeches - This picture gives a sense of how the room was dressed. Big posters + laptops running the game. Press and guests in the audience.

Interviews - this pic gives a sense of the atmosphere after the speeches. In this picture Tanner is talking about the game while one of his interns plays and I look on.

Writer/Designer Jeremy Bernstein jokes around with Andrea Seabrook from NPR. He did a great job in the interview and was quoted in the piece she produced (listen to the NPR piece here).
Wrap - here is the team with Rep. Tanner and John Anderson. From left to right: Rep John Tanner, Peggy Weil, me, John Anderson, Jeremy Bernstein, Duane Dunfield. Tanner really impressed me with how welcome he made everyone feel and how articulate and sincere he is about the issue of redistricting reform. Also it was a treat meeting John Anderson whom my dad voted for for president in 1980. I told him that and he said "always grateful for the support."

The event was a big success. Thanks to John Zollinger from USC for producing the event and getting all the people there.

Presented at the Games for Change Festival

I flew to NY yesterday to present the game at the Games for Change festival. We are excited to be here. Five people from the team made the trip, me, Duane Dunfield, Peggy Weil, Jeremy Bernstein, and Doug Thomas. We demo'd for the press during a press event Monday night. Bob Kerrey, president of New School University (which was the venue) gave a hilarious speech about the power of games and the internet.


Here is the banner that we used during the press event:




Here is a picture of me on a panel at the festival with Tracy Fullerton and Ian Bogost. The title of the panel was "A Moment of Crisis! Case Studies from the Trenches ".


The idea was to talk about design crises that happen during game productions and give case studies of how you solved them. I haven't seen a panel like this before and thought it was an astute concept because every game goes through design crises. It is good to acknowledge that fact and share info with fellow designers. I like to share this fact with my students so they don't feel like failures when it happens to them. I had a good time putting together the slides for this talk (full slides here).

lectures at Columbia and Carnegie Mellon

This week I gave invited lectures about game design - including The Redistricting Game - at Columbia U and Carnegie Mellon. Both talks were well attended. In fact about 200 people came to the Carnegie Mellon talk. Once again the interest level in this game exceeds my expectations.

Presented at Serious Games Summit in DC

Presented an early version of the game at the Serious Games Summit in Washington DC. Slides here. Lots of people attended the talk which was nice. I met and had lunch with Prof. James Gee from University of Wisconsin-Madison afterwards. He was walking around with my friend Eric Zimmerman. This was great because I am a fan of Gee's work - especially "What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning". I didn't realize that he had a position at USC before Wisconsin. Too bad he's not still at USC. I was quoted in this article in USA Today afterwards which was nice.

Presented at the Annenberg Speakers Series

Doug Thomas and I gave a lecture at the Annenberg Center about the game. I was pleased to be invited to this because they present real thought leaders at the series and the audience is usually professors and researchers and they tend to engage the speakers. Good stuff. Video of the 45 minute presentation is posted on this page (scroll down).