Clive -- totally right. A better way to talk about the Dean game is that it's the first officially endorsed campaign game to model the dynamics of a U.S. political election.

Supposedly, Jesse Ventura was going to use games in his reelection campaign, but then he decided not to run, so we never found out about that.

Cool -- that's interesting about the Jackson campaign!

Of course, the Dean game you created, Ian, is still the first one ever actually commissioned by a political candidate, and for an explicitly political reason. This Campaign '84 thing is more of a satire/parody of politics. Not that that disqualifies it as a form of commentary -- satire is, of course, precisely a form of commentary -- but it seemed more Mad-Magazine-like.

Right, right, it is more like a satire. There was also the Doonesbury election game in '92 (which was quite cool, actually), based on the same general idea as Campaign '84.

I think the key about what I'm trying to do with political games is exactly what you point out: these are games being used *as* political messages, not games talking *about* political messages. Key diff.

http://www.hotpotsoftware.com/p2000/p2000.htm

Hotpot Software had an election campaign game in 2000 and is updating for 2004.

That's incredibly cool -- thanks for pointing it out!

Please visit www.powerpolitics.us for another political game--press release coming tomorrow. Be sure to visit the message board for a sneak peek at some lovely graphics which will be part of the game interface. This game is the third installment of Power Politics by Randy Chase. It uses real candidates, real issues and real statistical data. In addition, you can create your own candidate. Under certain circumstances, you can even have your own picture included in the game, so the candidate you create can really be you!

You seem to be pretty aware of everything in gaming... That's really nice of you to share information with us.