The Gray Lady runs today a feature (free reg. req.) on political and campaign games, featuring most of the current Republican and Democrat campaign games. It has a nice pic of my pal Ian Bogost (and a mini-pic on myself on his monitor) and features both of us, including our games, Ian games and my own newsgames, as well as our own WaterCoolerGames project.rThe great thing is that it interviews the developers of most of the games in order to get their impressions, which is an extremely valuable resource for research. It is sort of hard to be both a developer and critic, but that did not prevent me from arguing that most of the current GOP games are very poor technically (I even was able to sneak in the term "ludological", probably a first in mainstream media ;)
rLast, but not least, the article anounces Opinions, a game Ian developed for the Democratic National Convention, in which I served as a design advisor. Ian did a terrific job and you will able to judge by yourselves very soon.
rIf anybody out there doubted that play can be serious, well, it doesn't get more serious than a presidential election. Certainly, there is still a LONG way to go for political videogames, but these early days are very exciting indeed.