It's a busy month in the world of political games. I'm very happy to announce that my studio Persuasive Games has just released Activism, the Public Policy Game, sponsored by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The game asks you to create a virtual activism plan, promoting the DCCC's goal of getting 10,000 activists on the ground before the election. You can muster your activists to six different public policy topics in two categories, Domestic Affairs (Economy, Education, Corporate Policy) and Foreign Affairs (Security, the Military, Internationalism). How you allocate your activists changes the way the games play, and your performance in each game affects the other issues. You play all the games simultaneously; the goal is to balance them all.

Activism was designed by me (Ian Bogost) and built by our awesome PG developers. My partner in crime Gonzalo Frasca participated as a design advisor.

The game also experiments with a new way to do public policy polling, allowing players to share their activism plans by providing demographic information, and to load other peoples' activism plans and play their ideology. I wouldn't claim that the game does scientific political polling, but I'm eager to see what happens.

Please note: If you have a blog and want to discuss the game, the game's webpage allows trackbacks. I encourage you to use it so we can get as many people playing as possible. The more people participate, the more interesting the underlying data, and therefore the game, will become.

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