The Redistricting Game

I noticed that the Redistricting Game is on the syllabus for this week (today), and it reminded me that I have been absolutely delinquent in posting what remains of my GDC notes. This one's particularly relevant because it's actually about the Redistricting Game. The guy who made it came to the GDC to solicit other serious game designers' thoughts on improving the game, which he recognizes is not perfect yet. Have any of you played through the game yet? I'd be curious to know if you come up with the same critiques that were mentioned at the GDC.

It seemed to me that what most of the other designers wanted out of this game was something that would be more striking, more upsetting to the people who played it. The cartoony graphics and the abstraction of the dots representing Democratic and Republican voters didn't give the game the immediacy that many thought the game needed to make an impact - especially after hearing how passionate the original designer got about this issue.

Although the designer wanted this game to be objective, several of his reviewers felt that it needed to make people angry, and that he should have invested more of his own feelings about redistricting into his game in order to make his players feel as strongly about the subject as he did. A few suggested that he ought to make a stronger push for media attention, and one came up with a kind of 'War of the Worlds' scenario that would make people really afraid of the fact that this kind of thing is going on /right now/. At the very least, many agreed that people should be able to see themselves reflected in the gameplay, by giving them something that's easier to identify with than colored dots on the screen. Allowing them to play at gerrymandering with real districts (rather than a made-up one) might help give the game that personal feel.

None of this is to say that the Redistricting Game has been a failure. In fact, the game has had great success getting people to write Congress, and getting Congress to take notice. We're playing it in class, aren't we? But in general, players were dissatisfied with the end-game survey as a way of motivating civic action. They felt that you have to lower the bar for people to get involved. One person came up with the idea of a button (which you can click at any time during game play) that allows you to send messages to your Congressman as soon as the game makes you angry enough to want to do so. Others suggested an idea from those livejournal quizzes that are everywhere these days: give players who finish the game something to post on their journals. How many voter blocs did you screw today?

• http://www.redistrictinggame.org/
  
• response: has gotten more Congresspeople to sponsor the Tanner bill than any other effort
  
• critique #1: simplify the context as far as tiny dots representative of Dem/Rep, because it's hard too differentiate dots from each other
  
• critique #2: passion in the presentation from the guy who made it was ... can you get into it faster? Needs brevity of message
  
• designer: objectivity was the most important thing here; didn't want to alienate people by being overbearing with a political stance
  
• does note that the most popular thing about the game is the (very slanted!) opening video, but insists that you need to be objective or people won't be convinced
  
• critique #3: art style, which is very cute, felt very disarming, very pleasant ... inappropriate
  
• critique #4: call to action was a survey, suggest that there's a share with friends feature (a la every LJ quiz ever), add zip code feature that links to write your representative, etc.
  
• how do you generate civic action from games? "One Click Civic Action"
  
• another guy to chips in to add, from his experience, that the people to lean on here are not the Congressmen but the state legislators. He's very invested in this project :)
  
• suggestion: incorporate the 'call to action' into the game from the start, rather than wait to the end for a survey; have, e.g., a button they can click at any time to send angry letters. Angry!
  
• critique #5: there's no personal connection with the blue/red dots on the screen; you want citizens to say 'That's me being manipulated!' and get pissed off
  
• difference between objectivity and sterility! >:-( It comes across as a lecture, not insight
  
• information does not change behavior; affective
  
• suggestion #1: make it a War of the Worlds spoof, get a lot of press attention with it, etc.
  
• How would the game be different if the first thing you put on the chalkboard was "We need to make people mad?"
  
• critique #6: don't make it an abstraction, show them that it really affects them and their area
  
• suggestion #2: play from viewpoint of the people who have initiated lawsuits
  
• critique #7: doesn't teach people the actual reasons some of these districts get drawn like this
  
• story: when redrawing a district, one party started at the top, took what they wanted; the other party started at the bottom, took what they wanted ... middle got lumped in
  
• story: redistricting in a black neighborhood guaranteed a black rep, inciting Democrats to sue each other over the racism of it all, but it also guaranteed two Republican reps in the districts that were created from the overflow
  
• can you make it fun to be mad, teaching things like this?