I just found PopMatters' late January review of our Dean for Iowa Game. GameCritics.com just featured three of Gonzalo's games, including Dean for Iowa and September 12. As Gonzalo and I prepare to write more seriously about this game's successes and failures, I'm taking hints from some of these reviews.

The most common criticism is a valid one: the game doesn't say much about politics.

I'm really glad to have these perspectives on the game. Gonzalo and I have said before that the game was intended for Deaniacs, not fence-sitters, and so its goals were actually about concretizing the abstract idea of grassroots support and campaigning. When we write about it more formally, we'll show how this aspect of the game played out, as it were.

But the fact that the former response to the game was so common deserves some mention in advance. As time wore on after Iowa, I found myself wondering if this wasn't this the problem with the Dean campaign in general -- it was so focused on networking and outreach that policy became insurmountably occluded. Last month I shared my thoughts after Joe Trippi's talk at Etech. Said I:

I still believe this. Had the campaign continued, we would have done another game with them, and it would have been a policy game. Happily, I'm working on some other, similar projects that hopefully will become examples of policy games.

Nevertheless, when I look back on the Dean campaign, I have the candid (even if perhaps deluded) impression that the Dean for Iowa Game actually provided one of the campaign's least abstract, most fungible representations of the power of grassroots outreach. I don't mean executions of grassroots outreach, I mean coherent, front-line depictions of how grassroots campaigning claimed individuals could make a difference.

For what it's worth, the highest score we recorded in the game was 780 virtual Iowans.