Robert Yang made a web-based clicker game called Up the Vote in response to news about dismal voter registration rates among young people in New Zealand, where he lives. I enjoyed both reading about it and playing it—which is apparently only possible for a few more days, until the real-life registration deadline passes.

Yang’s rumination on so-called “serious games” is interesting to me too; I am at least adjacent to the “old game studies academics” he mentions as a group, and recall when talk of games as agents for social change seemed to be everywhere. Gosh, yeah, I haven’t really thought much about that in years, though I expect that says more about me and where my life has taken me since circa-2006 than anything else.