News from Magic Lantern that there’s now a blog tracking their presidential election game Frontrunner as it progresses towards release in March. Screenshots show you can pick your candidate – Gore or Bush, from the looks of it. I suppose playing this year’s election might be a bit much…
I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
Jill
I emailed Dawn at Magic Lantern asking her this and she very speedily replied:
“no, our goal really isn’t to simulate the last election between Gore and Bush — although the way the artificial intelligence for the game is set up, when you choose the same issues that Gore and Bush supported in the last election, the outcome is the same — Florida switches back and forth between the campaigns.
The goal of Frontrunner is to build support for your campaign across all 50 states (and D.C.). You can choose to be a historical politician or yourself and you run against one to 3 competitors.”
We were painstaking in figuring out state demographics and interest groups so the game should be both accurate and fun.”
Dawn Maye
Hi Jill,
I just wanted to make sure you knew about our article in USA Today: USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/2004-04-23-frontrunner_x.htm
There are some great screenshots within the article.
We’re in beta testing right now and will be doing some focus testing soon. Frontrunner should be out in June.
Let me know if you want any additional information. We’re getting an incredible outpouring of media about us! It looks like people worldwide are clamoring for a US Presidential Election game they can really get involved in.
Frontrunner: we put the game into politics, now it’s your turn to play.
🙂 Hope you enjoy the article!