Ty Colfax at G4TV has an interview up with Persuasive Games founding partner Ian Bogost who documents the agony of getting his iPhone game, Jetset: A Game for Airports, through Apple’s approvals process.
We first wrote about newsgame Airport Security back in 2006, today Ian Bogost reports that an iPhone version of the game is now available in the App Store.
Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games is releasing their latest serious game addressing (surprise!) the issue of obesity on Monday. Entitled Fatworld, the game purports to examine the ” the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics ….” During his guest editor stint here at Kotaku, Bogost described Fatworld as “something like Animal Crossing meets Super Size Me.”
By choosing your character’s dietary and exercise habits, you can experiment with the constraints of nutrition and economics as they affect your character’s general health. Will it be wheatgrass and soy? Or fried chicken at every meal? How much can you afford to spend on food, and how does that affect your general health? Characters who eat poorly will get fat. Characters who don’t exercise will move around the world more laboriously. Disease and death will eventually ravage players with poor health, while those with good health will live to a ripe age.
Sounds … weighty, on a number of levels. We’ll see what public reception is like in a few days.
Prepare to Fatten [Water Cooler Games]
A few months ago, my studio Persuasive Games made a simple newsgame for CNN, which they published as Presidential Pong. For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, newsgames are a simple type of political game akin to the editorial cartoon.
Presidential Pong wasn’t the best newsgame we’ve ever done (that one was probably Airport Security, a game about the arbitrary nature of TSA screening). But it was effective enough. Released right around the first Presidential debate, the game was intended both to introduce the primary candidates and to satirize the very idea of debate. In Pong, players return tennis volleys. In Presidential Pong, they return campaign volleys. Politics is, as ever, optional.
Since then, we’ve been getting regular abusive emails and phone calls from Ron Paul supporters. More »
