Academics with geek in their blood and geeks who hang out on college campuses might be interested in this new(ish) find: The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

It’s not a gaming journal. Rather, it proposes to look at

developments in virtual reality and gaming both in terms of technologies and conceptualization

The Journal currently has a call for papers on Social Identity and Consumer Behavior in Virtual Worlds. Deadline is August 15^th.

Shannon Raybold is the Internet Director at the United Nations Foundation, where she oversees online organizing and fundraising for the Foundation and our campaigns. One of her recent campaigns is NothingButNets.net, which uses an online game to raise money for and build awareness about the Foundation’s anti-malaria program.

Shannon and I spoke by email about the campaign.

What did you create?

We created an interactive online game for our anti-malaria campaign, Nothing But Nets (www.NothingButNets.net). The game, Deliver the Net, shows supporters a glimpse of how their life-saving $10 donation of a bed net is distributed to those in Africa - it allows you to pick up the nets from a UN truck and jump over the hurdles to deliver the bed nets to awaiting villagers. And, each time someone plays the game and signs up, a generous donor will send a real bed net on their behalf. The game is educational and functional.

Why did you decide to use an online game?

We are constantly trying to reach out to new supporters as well as enable people to more fully understand the need and the steps that are taken to ensure the bed nets are delivered. Additionally, a generous (and anonymous) donor has committed to donating a real net for each new person who plays the game and signs up and we thought that such a generous offer should be accompanied with a new type of fun engagement.

How successful has it been?

It has been very successful, we’ve had over 10,000 people play the game, our traffic has more than doubled, and donations have also increased. After 20 days of gamming, we’ve been picked up by over 55 blogs.

What did you learn from doing it?

It was a longer, more complicated process to set it up than I thought it would be, but well worth the experiment! I also learned that what people want in terms of difficulty varies widely – I’ve gotten requests for much harder and others who find it difficult. I think we’ve reached a very different audience with this game and gotten them excited about how easy and cheap it is to prevent malaria which kills a child every 30 seconds in Africa.

I’ve been playing around with the National Journal’s Political Stock Exchange all day and I’m completely hooked. It’s a fairly intricate predictions tool, with all the numbers pulled from Intrade, the leader in online futures markets. I’ve been buying up Mitt Romney as the Republican Nominee in the low 20s all morning, and Wes Clark’s weekend endorsement of Hillary Clinton has got me bullish on Wes Clark as Democratic VP Nominee at 20 National Journal dollars (NJ$) per share.

(If this doesn’t make sense, here’s how it works: All contracts pose a question, say, “Will Fred Thompson be the GOP nominee?”  If the outcome is true, then you get the full value of the contract, which is 100. If it’s false, you get zero. Until the contract matures- in our example, when the GOP nominee is decided- the price fluctuates based on market activity. So if you buy Thompson as the GOP nominee at 40NJ$, and he wins the nomination, you make 60NJ$. If he fails to win the nomination, you lose 40).

Predictions markets are a very popular method of perception peer production. Justin Wolfers has a brief explanation here. He suggests they’re a useful tool. Others aren’t so sure. You may also remember the furor created by DARPA in 2003 when they tried to use a futures market to predict terrorist attacks. That program was axed, but online futures markets have become popular for those who want to make predictions on a whole range of pop culture questions.

And because I know you’re wondering, in National Journal’s exchange, Hillary Clinton is leading the Democratic field at 69.2NJ$. In other words, the market puts Senator Clinton’s chances of winning the nomination at 69.2%.  Fred Thompson leads the GOP field at 40 NJ$.

In October 2004 we held an event that looked at Independently-Produced Web Videos in the 2004 Campaign. As part of the event, we asked our graduate research assistants to watch as many political web videos as possible.

We watched a lot of snarky videos and animations. But some of the most interesting tings we interacted with weren’t videos: they were the politically-themed games, like The Howard Dean for Iowa Game.

We didn’t know what to do with them.

They didn’t quite fall into the category we were researching. Watching a video, however humorous or inflammatory, simply is not as engaging as playing a game, such as pretending to be Tom Delay chasing after bags of money, to use a more recent example. (Delay’s Dollars, designed by Blackrock Associates won a 2007 Golden Dot Award for best Animation or Mashup.)

They were, in a word, irresistible: hard to put down and hard to forget. The image of Tom Delay bobbing across a screen, saying “Money, my money,” every time he grabs a bag of money was a joke around our offices for a week.

Politically-themed games aren’t a pleasant way to obtain a few giggles. Because they ask users to engage in a scenario – whether that scenario is running a grassroots campaign or grabbing bags of cash – games have the ability to establish and reinforce political themes and teach political strategy.

Ian Bogost, founding partner of Persuasive Games (which designed the Dean for Iowa Game, amongst dozens of others over the past several years) and author of a new book called Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames believes that video games immerse players in a virtual world of political rhetoric and expression:

Videogames are particularly useful tools for visualizing the logics that make up a worldview . . . The politics of [Hurricane] Katrina and counter-terrorism only become apparent thought the unusual conditions that expose their underlying logics; such situations are rare in everyday practice – and perhaps ideally avoided. . . . Political videogames use procedural rhetorics to expose how political structures operate, or how they fail to operate, or how they could or should operate. Videogames that engage political topics codify the logic of a political system through procedural representation. . . .

If policy issues are complex systems that recombine and interrelate with one an other according to smaller rules of interaction, then videogames afford a new perspective on political issues, since they are especially effective at representing complex systems.

In other words, games have the ability to immerse players in the political process – from running grassroots get-out-the-vote activities to addressing policy issues to confronting political issues, such as gerrymandering (See our post on The Redistricting Game). They are interactive parables that have the potential to engage users in a way that today’s Sunday morning political programs simply or grainy, awful, 20-minute YouTube footage of a candidate’s stump speech in Iowa do not.

Games, when created in the right way, have the potential to do what even they most well-designed political ad cannot: engage, immerse, and guide people through a policy decisions, political action (donating, grassroots organizing, persuading neighbors), and possibly even a candidate’ life story.

(And we’re not just talk about kids. Some of the most avid players of casual games happen to be middle-aged women.)

We’d like to predict that by the beginning of the primaries, at least one of the candidates will develop a game that looks at one of his or her policy issues. It would, at the very least, give us something to talk about at our 2008 Politics Online Conference on March 4^th and 5^th.

But politics can be a slow-moving animal. So we might see a fantastic game emerge from the 2008 campaigns. Or we might have to wait.

Ever wanted to manipulate congressional districts to suit your political agenda?

Admit it: if you’re a political junkie, then you’ve probably wished for it on more than one occasion. And then you sighed and said to yourself “if only I were that lucky.”

Today just might be your lucky day . . . virtually speaking.

Check out The Redistricting Game, produced by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication, Annenberg School for Communication, and School of Cinematic Arts.

The Game

The Redistricting Game allows you to pick a political party and complete missions in the fictional states of Jefferson, Adams and Hamilton. Early missions test your skills at creating population equality (it’s actually trickier than it sounds. I’m no wiz with numbers, so I’m still having a little difficulty making it past the first mission) before moving on to tasks like partisan gerrymandering. The final map is submitted to the virtual legislature, governor, courts, and even the press.

Why gaming? For Chris Swain, one of the project leaders at USC, it’s a no-brainer. “Gaming is the most powerful medium for a message like this,” Swain told IPDI this morning. “We can use games to affect social change and it puts the issue into a fun online setting.”

The Mission

Swain and the rest of The Redistricting Game team are on a mission. According to their promotional material,

Redistricting for political advantage seriously undercuts the democratic process by diminishing the power of an individual’s vote. Gerrymandering is stealth issue; its impact on the election process is significant, while citizen awareness of the issue remains low . . . most citizens do not understand the complex inter-workings, details and vocabulary of a system that enables partisan and incumbent self-interest to trump a practice designed to preserve democracy.

The Redistricting Game team also felt responsibility to make the game as fair as possible. In other words, they don’t want to use gaming to market any one ideology to you. They just want you to try it for yourself and come to you own conclusions.

The Post-Game Action

With The Redistricting Game, however, just playing the game is only one piece in the puzzle. The game also allows users to learn how their states manage redistricting. I searched for Pennsylvania, and the site directed me to FairVote.org.

It also allows you to look up your Representative, write him or her and send an email to your friends.

Why We Like It

Even though I can’t make it through the first mission (numbers are tricky), the game makes the complexities of redistricting more interesting than a story or two in the paper or a post or two online.

It’s also addicting. The actual process of redistricting (pulling on the sides of a district with your mouse to increase them) feels pretty good.

After five months of development, Sweden finally opened its official Second Life embassy. The “Second House of Sweden” sits on a 158 acre island and is modeled on the country’s new Washington embassy. It will even include designer Swedish furniture. Says Foreign Minister and avid blogger Carl Bildt:

“Second Life is just beginning so we do not know its full potential. Ten years ago we didn’t know the potential of Google for instance.”

Indeed. This was before Bildt crashed his flying, scissor wielding avatar into a tree (the scissors were for the ribbon-cutting, you see). The embassy won’t have a political function, nor will it issue passports or visas. However, visitors to the virtual outpost can take in exhibitions and cultural events, as well as learn about famous Swedes. Olle Waestberg, the director of the Swedish Institute (a “foreign ministry agency tasked with spreading information about Sweden”), helped the foreign minister open the embassy simultaneously in both Stockholm and Second Life.

We should note that this isn’t the first official foreign mission in Second Life. The Maldives (pop. 329k) beat Sweden into the virtual world by a week, opening its embassy on March 22.

“They beat us to the gate,” said Olle Wastberg, a former Swedish consul in New York.

The Library of Congress might well be one of the first parts of the federal government to start incorporating interactivity and social media into its web presence.

Yesterday Kevin Novak, director of web services for the Library of Congress, spoke at a Web Managers Roundtable event in Northern Virginia about social media. Novak is trying to use the Internet to encourage participatory volunteerism and reach people in a way that maintains LOC’s relevance in an era of digital media.

LOC’s current and upcoming online efforts include:

• Using Flickr to post pictures of the LOC content and ask the general public to help collect information on different items of historical interest.
• Developing a pilot program in Second Life.
• Launching a blog – the first in the federal space, according to Novak – authored by LOC’s director of communications, Matt Raymond. To date, the blog entry that generated the “busiest” response asked readers to name their favorite books.
• Online collections that include webcasts.

Novak considers LOC’s web presence to be an experiment for interactivity on the federal websites. The unknown, the gray areas, the questions that we don’t even know exist yet – those are the sticking points, according to Novak. He mentioned a few of them at the roundtable:

What process determines who gets to write the official blog for a federal organization?

Is the LOC’s web presence a part of the public record?

Do constraints to online interactivity exist that the LOC hasn’t explored yet?

How does a federal organization achieve success online?

Ahh, the unanswered questions. 

This is our sixth in a series of interviews with industry professionals discussing the state of online politics. The Politics Online Conference is just around the corner; here we sit down with Jason Rosenberg, Strategy Architect for EchoDitto, discussing the utilization of the internet in politics, specifically in campaigns.

Special thanks, once again, to Capitol Hill Broadcasting Network for hosting IPDI’s Vlog posts!

This is our third in a series of interviews with industry professionals discussing the state of online politics. We are little more than a month away from our 2007 Politics Online Conference; here we sit down with Cheryl Contee, Vice President of Issue Dynamics Inc., to talk about how Issue Dynamics utilized technology in 2006 and where she sees web 2.0 taking political activism in the years to come.

Special thanks, once again, to Capitol Hill Broadcasting Network for hosting IPDI’s Vlog posts!

This is our second in a series of interviews with industry professionals discussing the state of online politics. Here, we sit down with Jeff Mascott, Managing Director of the Adfero Group, to talk about the impact of the utilization of technology on politics in 2006 and what we should expect in the years to come.

Special thanks, once again, to Capitol Hill Broadcasting Network for hosting IPDI’s Vlog posts!