What is the goal with my final degree project? Well, I’m striving to make a game that focuses on current issue of deepening political polarization in the United States. The idea would be to one, educate my audience about the issue (although some may know this is in fact an issue, they may not have necessarily understand the complexities of the problem, or they may just feel that that’s just the way the country is). Secondly, as with any grassroots effort, the game will need to provide some way to spring people into action, whether that be in game or not. I’ve got a lot to work out…

Audience

Initially, I was inspired to try to capture a middle school audience as the result of a previous game project I worked on, along with my own biases. However, I’ve come to realize that the middle school demographic might not necessarily be appropriate for the subject matter. So I’ve started looking at some state cirriculum standards in Florida, California, Texas, Colorado, and Iowa. To sum it up, I’ve realized that I need to be looking at high school students rather than middle school students, especially if I’m going to be working with local students (Coloradans) to test this out. More about my findings later…

Platform

I really wanted to develop for iPhone/iPod Touch, mostly because at the time I was dreaming up this project I thought it’d be cool, but also because of the large amount of young people who have an iPod Touch. Off the top of my head, almost half of iPod Touch owners were in the 12-17 age range. However, I feel in spite of that, it may limit my reach with this game, and although I’m not counting this out in a future endeavor, I may find that I might just be able to develop my game on the web which could be accessed by mobile devices with web capabilities. What I really think I need to do is concentrate on making a Scratch prototype of the game first, then worry about getting it to the next level with something like the Processing js library, or maybe just Processing itself. I’m not confident that I could get an iPhone game built in time for May 2010, so I figure I need to scale down! If I go the web direction, I have a much better chance at gearing my efforts towards hooking my game in with Twitter or some other form of social media (that is if it fits into the overall message strategy for the game).

Game Content

I think I’ve finally found my inspiration for a single event that is not only close to home, but also recent and encapsulates my issue of polarization. Tom Tancredo gave a speech in Nashville recently where he stated President Barack Obama was elected because of “people who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English.’” And further that in order to vote, people should be subjected to a civics literacy test. Does this remind anyone of the Jim Crow laws? Although when you think about this objectively, one would think “yea, a person should understand the way things work before they can vote”. But that’s not necessarily how it would play out as we’ve seen in the past. The way this seems to me, it’s incredibly polarizing because it’s aimed at keeping “the cult of multiculturalism” from having a say when it comes time to cast ballots. More about the details of how I will work this into some game ideas…

Goals?

Now that I have an idea for content, this obviously will help flesh out my goals. It’s much easier to envision a game now that I have some content to work with. When you think about this situation with the suggestion of literacy tests to vote, what comes to mind first is the fairness in which these tests are administered. Who gets what questions? Is everybody screened? If not, how will people be selected to screen? I will go into more detail about this in a subsequent post about game ideas…