Image Credit: iCivics
Politics has become virtually inescapable, whether on social media or in games. For the nonprofit iCivics, this isn’t a recent development. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded it in 2009 to provide tools for civic education with free games like Counties Work and We the Jury, which are all available on the web.
Its most popular, like Executive Command and Win the White House, are also on iOS and Android.iCivics develops free lesson plans and games for students ranging from elementary school to high school, and it’s careful to be nonpartisan. The goal has always been to start the conversation and give students information, not to sway their political beliefs; however, executive director Louise Dubé told GamesBeat that in the current political atmosphere, it’s been tougher than ever to do so.
“Obviously, the country has gotten more polarized,” said Dubé in a phone call. “What started out as a non-partisan stance in some of our games is now being challenged as potentially partisan, because the policy proposals in real life are more polarized. We think about that a great deal.”
To counteract any possible partisanship, iCivics has an internal review process that’s reviewed by academics. Once a game is published, they review the content based on feedback they receive and adjust as needed.
“If people have issues after the publication of the content, we take a look at it again, but for the most part, when we get as many comments from the right as we do from the left, we feel like we’ve probably done our jobs,” said Dubé.
iCivics gets the most traffic around presidential elections, but they also see activity throughout the whole school year starting in August when most students return to the classroom. After the 2016 presidential election, Dubé says that they received a significant uptick in traffic.
“We had a 20 percent increase in interest in games like Executive Command and Win the White House, which were related to events directly,” said Dubé. “We saw more than 200 percent increase in traffic. We’ve had 90,000 user reviews this year. It’s been a tremendous experience. It makes the point that games for learning are effective.”
Because of the young age of most…
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