HN user
I can see people losing their minds about a lie that leads to war compared to overselling a change to medical insurance. I would like politicians (or anybody) not to lie about anything, but the consequences of those seem to be in completely different ballparks.
I was surprised how much I got into the "walking simulator" Dear Esther. It just had beautiful art direction and sort of semi-random nonsensical voice over that gave it a bit of atmosphere. It turns a lot of people off for being pretentious and having zero gameplay, but I still really enjoyed it just to ogle the scenery. It was only about an hour long.
Oh, no doubt that the information is out there in other formats. I'm interested in the concept of using games as a medium and perhaps my expectations were in the wrong place.
The game pretty much consists of "do you want to turn back from voting, or continue to vote and have $BAD_THING happen" (if you are not a white programmer from California).
The game format doesn't really do much here. Of course extremely long lines, abusive bosses, distant polling locations and abusive election observers are bad. Clicking yes/no doesn't really get the point across better. I'd rather read an article with some research about how different demographics are impacted. Heck, ending the game with a link to some statistics would have been good (correct me if I missed them).
I want to juxtapose this with another game with a social message: Cart Life. It had you making decisions as a low income worker. As the game went on your series of problems and decisions start accumulating in a way that helped communicate that small problems in the right place for people with no safety net can be disastrous.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that a game is a good way to communicate interactions between things or events in an easy to digest way, but probably a bad way of communicating a simple "this exists" message, since a game can contain whatever you imagine.