Playing Politics Workshop Response

While experimenting with these simulation games, I decided to let the kid I was babysitting try the games. Well, he is just 11, but he did quickly understand how to play, without even reading the instruction or understanding what the buttons said (New York defender has the buttons in French, but that did not bother him at all!). Of course, he is a bit young to know much about politics, but when he mentioned the games he had played to his older cousin, she did understand what it truly was about and so did I when I first saw the game.

New York Defender has a clear message and basically anyone around the world would understand that it is concerned with the September 11 attacks, but would they really get the message? I do believe that both games, New York Defender and Donkey John are effective at a certain degree. Most people over a certain age (maybe 15, since before that young kids rarely know anything about politics) can guess what it is about, but they also will not necessarily take it seriously and will just play for the fun of it. However, once you discover that those games never end and you can actually never win (this is the case for New York Defender), people might start to think about what this is really saying. ‘This is not just a game, it also represents the current situation’, then maybe they would get interested in the true meaning of the characters. I am not sure if I would have read the instruction or anything about the game. It does depend on the political contain. I can relate to certain political issues such as New York Defender, but at first, I did not see who Donkey John represented nor what the purpose of this oil trajectory was. If this game had been sent to me via email, I would have read the context, because I know it would have been sent with a purpose, but if it just had appeared while I was researching, I would not have paid as much attention. This is just to conclude that those simulation games are more complex than we think and the level of effectiveness depends on the person who plays them.

Recently I have learnt that there exist a lot of refugee camps in Australia, where the conditions are terrible. I knew those camps existed in the 80s, but I thought common sense would have made them disappear. So if I had to write a political simulation game, I would take up this issue and it would look like this: a member of the United Nations would realize these camps are unhuman and would come rescue all the refugees by opening the gate. Each person would have a description of their past including the reason why they are still in the camps. Then the winner would have let out every refugee before the Australian government catches them.