Politics and Game Design
Friend of Six to Start Tom Armitage pointed us in his entry Obama for America, the MMO toward the product page for the Obama '08 iPhone application.
As Tom quoted:
See nationwide Obama ‘08 Call Friends totals and find out how your call totals compare to leading callers.
This is what makes us so excited about what we do - the potential to take game design and play concepts like scores, leaderboards and playful interfaces and apply them to applications way outside of game design. Tom's right: the Obama campaign's insight by providing leaderboards in the iPhone app like this demonstrate that they get game design as a tool for encouraging people to take action.