Steroid Slugger was never released…

Points of Entry, Persuasive Games, 2007

From Columbia Journalism Review:

In the summer of 2007, one of the hottest debates in America centered on immigration. Every pundit and politico had an opinion on the merit-based system proposed in the McCain-Kennedy Bill, either criticizing its rejection of family ties or heralding its standardization of the path to citizenship. In an effort to cut through the noise and give people a deeper understanding of the bill, Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games created a “newsgame” called “Points of Entry,” which debuted on the op-ed section of The New York Times’s website. The game asked players to construct hypothetical immigrants—specifying their clothes, education level, English proficiency, and more—in order to literally “out-qualify” another candidate.

The immigration bill never passed—in fact, it never even came to a vote in the Senate. Yet “Points of Entry” allowed players to grasp potential pitfalls of the bill that had seldom been conveyed by the traditional media. In Newsgames: Journalism at Play, Bogost and his coauthors make a broader case for such games, arguing that they allow people to experience news in novel ways. “There is nothing medium-specific about journalism,” writes Bogost, “no reason that its output must take the familiar form of text, image or video.”

“Playing Around”, Alyssa Abkowitz, Columbia Journalism Review

Read the Berfrois interview with Simon Ferrari on Newsgames here