Playing Politics Workshop Response

In examine the two games, September 12th and the Kabul Kaboom, I think these political simulation games are effective in communication with people via the internet. As Frasca states in Lee’s article, these games are designed in a situation that you will never win (but its not the problem of the player’s ability), which is quite a contrary to the normal games we play, and this would result to a reflection to the players to the meaning of the game as long as they try to figure out the intentions of that mechanism.

Also, I think the political message in the two games I examined is obvious enough to transmit to the players. One of the reasons lies in the instructions of the games that they both instruct the players that they are not simply games. In the September 12th, it says “This is not a game” and “You can’t win and you can’t lose” in the first page of the instruction. Similarly, the instruction in Kabul Kaboom says “Remember kids, you can’t win this game, just lose.” These explicit instructions to the players could easily drive the players interest on what’s the content of the game. Moreover, the content and the mechanism of the two games are explicit enough to the players to get the message too. As long as we play the Septemer 12th for a while, we would easily observe that there are more and more terrorists in the town that people are turning to be terrorists when someone is being killed; the Kabul Kaboom is also a tough game that the dropping of the bombs are so much that we have no way to avoid “eating” the booms.

If I m going to make a political simulation game, I would like to talk a similar topic to that in the game September 12th about the violence would cause only more violence. As there is a template with nine holes, there will be the heads of the terrorists coming up randomly , the task of the players is to hit the head by the mouse in order to “kill” a terrorist. However, as long as the players hit one of the heads, there will be more heads coming out more frequently and with more numbers too. Finally heads will be coming up so quick that the player would no longer able to hit them, and hence bring out the message.

Lee, S. S. “I Lose, therefore I think.” Game Studies. Dec 2003. Accessed on 18 May 2006.