Nominated for a Golden Dot Award

The Redistricting Game is up for a Golden Dot Award from the Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet. Vote here.

Making this Game Better: The Redistricting Game at GDC

The Game Developer's Conference (GDC) is the biggest and most important conference for game developer's. I will be running a two-part session at this year's conference during the GDC Serious Games program called Make This Game Better: The Redistricting Game. Here are the details:

MONDAY Feb 18
Make this Game Better: THE REDISTRICTING GAME (Part I)
Speaker(s): Chris Swain (University of Southern California)
Time: 10:30-11am
In 2007 Chris Swain lead a USC Annenberg School team to design a serious game with the purpose of helping the public understand the process of legislative redistricting and reforms related to redistricting. Redistricting is the process of producing defined geographic boundaries of population which are represented in Congress or the state legislature. As more and more powerful demographic systems and mapping software have become available, redistricting has grown into a very elite game of optimization also known as gerrymandering. Each side in the process (essentially the two major political parties) attempts to push a slate of designed districts it feels are advantageous to their party's candidates through the legislative and negotiation process. The results can sometimes be astoundingly bizarre shaped districts and ultimately result in voter confusion and disenfranchisement from the entire process.

THE REDISTRICTING GAME tries to capture the core yearning for optimization process that exists in redistricting but then attempts to show users various proposed reforms in the process as new constraints on the rules of the game. Users are then given links to various reform sites as well.

The game is now out and fully playable. Like all games there are many ideas that never made it through the final cut. In this session, Chris will present the full version of THE REDISTRICTING GAME. Two leads from the audience will be announced and then each lead will have over 24 hours to compile ideas into a quick presentation for the following day detailing an imagined 2.0 version of the game and associated project. The goal of this session is not to just make the game itself better but to figure out new ideas the potentially improve the impact of the project's mission. After the presentations the audience will be given a chance to respond. Chris will then offer some rebuttal and comments to the efforts allowing insight into why certain ideas may or may not work from his standpoint as the team lead.

TUESDAY Feb 19
Make this Game Better: THE REDISTRICTING GAME (Continued)
Speaker(s): Chris Swain (University of Southern California)
Time: 4:40-5:10pm
Please see "Make this Game Better: THE REDISTRICTING GAME (Part I)."

Redistricting Game at the ONA conference - online journalism

Duane Dunfield, lead engineer and one of the designers of The Redistricting Game, presented the game at the Online News Association conference in Toronto on Oct 18.

These are interesting times for traditional journalism outlets - especially newspapers - because circulations are dwindling as more and more people embrace the internet. As a result these businesses are working hard to figure out how they can transition online in a sustainable way. This spells opportunity for online professionals.

At the conference Duane talked about "Using Serious Games to Engage Readers". The session was packed and many journalists wanted to talk about The Redistricting Game and serious games in general. A good write up appeared in Editor & Publisher magazine.

Presented at DIGRA 2007 conference (University of Tokyo)

I wrote a paper called "Designing Games to Effect Social Change" for the DIGRA 2007 conference. DIGRA stands for Digital Games Research Association. At the conference I talked about The Redistricting Game on a panel with Ellen Scott from the Games for Change organization, Rafael Fajardo from University of Denver, and Doug Thomas from USC.

The audience was interested and asked good questions. This was a bit surprising considering how diverse they were - many of them were academic game researchers who do not study persuasive games and many of them were European and thus do not have much concern about U.S. redistricting policy.

I saw this post from one of the attendees, Cindy Poremba. She says some interesting things about my talk.

Aside from my presentations it was fantastic to spend a week in Tokyo with a bunch of game researchers and designers.

Redistricting - The Movie?

Filmmaker Jeff Reichert is putting together a movie about redistricting. He contacted me recently and had this to say on his blog:

"We’ve recently befriended the folks behind the ultra-cool Redistricting Game. I’ve had a number of calls with project leader Chris Swain, and am currently preparing some visual treatments that we’ll hopefully use as a basis for future collaboration. In an ideal world, we’ll work closely with the game designers to create animation sequences tailor-made for the film. Please do check out the game. It’s very elegant, informative, and most of all, fun."

Jeff has been meeting with the usual redistricting reform suspects in DC including John Tanner's office. It would be exciting to see The Redistricting Game included in Jeff's film.

Interesting discussion about The Redistricting Game in a Second Life forum

There's an interesting discussion about the game going on in a Second Life forum here. Second Lifers are generally into technology, games, and politics for whatever reason so this project resonates with them. Interesting...

Cool video story on home page of YouTube.com

I was interviewed by the good folks at WhyTuesday.org the other day. WhyTuesday is an activist organization that seeks election reform - especially any measure that would increase voter turnout by moving Election Day from a Tuesday (e.g. a workday) to the weekend or holiday. They have a relationship with YouTube wherein their videos are featured on YouTube's homepage on the day they are released. This video was on the homepage on August 10.

Jacob Soboroff is the correspondent and a good guy. He did a nice job with the piece don't you think?