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Save the whales
To help try and recruit volunteers to go to Iowa, Howard Dean’s campaign recently released what is surely a campaign-year first: Their own online video game. Go to The Dean For America Game, and you can play a simulation of the subtle joys of tramping across frozen-ass Iowa trying to get out the vote.
Slate asked me to write a piece about the game, to sort of follow up my 2002 essay on how Flash games have become the latest tools for political commentary. The full Dean piece is online here, but here’s an excerpt:
In Slate last month, Steven Johnson wondered why U.S. politics had never been the subject of a simulation game. He suggested it’s because politicking is too complex to be captured in a game’s artificial intelligence. That’s certainly true of the stuff that happens on K Street; it’d be pretty hard to sim a carbon-emissions-quota lobbying effort.
But Iowa-style campaigning? That’s just a numbers game—flooding the state with as many volunteers as you can. It’s hard, but it ain’t rocket science. Indeed, getting out the vote is the closest that politics comes to pure algorithmic physics: If your opponent has X volunteers and you have X+10, then you win. A political game hits with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but that’s the point; like a political cartoon, its simplicity tries to clarify the issues.
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
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» visit the Collision Detection archives
September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM
From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:
One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?
Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.
September 25, 2008 » 11:21 AM
“Video from a camp north of Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby, snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter pastime of young Canadian motorists.” - A key piece of evidence submitted in the trial of a gang of alleged young Canadian terrorists.
September 24, 2008 » 11:21 PM
“Life imitates art imitating life: just thought a gnat crawling across my monitor was part of a Flash-based ad. I clicked it.” - A Tweet from Bill Braine.
September 24, 2008 » 02:37 PM
“Funniest FB friend request ever: “Twitter friend hoping to get to second base (Facebook!) ;-).”” - A recent Tweet by Pistachio
September 24, 2008 » 12:28 PM
Chinese powdered-milk crisis creates a new market: The return of the wet nurse
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