Water Cooler Games - Points of Entry: New Newsgame at the New York Times

Points of Entry: New Newsgame at the New York Times
June 22, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

The New York Times has published this month's Persuasive Games newsgame, Points of Entry.

In the game, players compete to award Green Cards under the Merit-Based Evaluation System included in legislation recently debated in Congress.

The system, proposed in legislation sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy, outlined a Federal standard for worker visa awards, based not on individual achievement, but on a single, standardized system for all immigrants. Some criticized the bill for rejecting family ties, others for putting business interests in the hands of the government. In either case, the promise of one single method to judge the absolute merit of immigrant workers demonstrates the real value of contemporary domestic policy: bureaucracy itself.

During debate about the 380-page bill, neither legislators nor the popular press brought its details to the public. One official congressional brief offered two examples. If the Internet fails to cash out the promise of increased citizen participation in policy making, games might allow citizens to experience the implications of legislation more directly. Points of Entry offers one example of such a practice.

You can play the game online at nytimes.com. A TimesSelect subscription is required.

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Comment from Robin Sloan on June 22, 2007

Hey Ian -- This is super-awesome. Just played the game and really enjoyed it -- the production values are incredible.

Wondering if you're planning on doing any sort of behind-the-scenes post on these -- talking a bit about how you generate the ideas, how many people it takes to produce them, how long, etc.? My curiosity is piqued b/c these games seem to straddle the worlds of software development and journalism -- and are so timely and topical.

Comment from Ian Bogost on June 25, 2007

Hey Robin, thanks for playing. We have talked about doing some kind of postmortemish thing, but I'm not exactly sure what form that will take yet. I can tell you that it's 3 people working for roughly one week on these games. And your observation about software-meets-journalism is, I hope, dead on!

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