The Waffler

General Description Play the role of a political candidate and take a stance on a barrage of policy questions that come at you during the campaign. Can you stay true to your values and still garner the support you need to win an election?

Demo of the game: http://bit.ly/the-waffler

This game could be packaged with a guide to candidates and campaign issues that many newspapers already publish for local, state or national elections. The game also illustrates the tension candidates face between their need to gain enough public support to win and to remain true to their convictions on controversial issues.

Slides of our pitch: http://bit.ly/waffler-pitch

Technical Aspects: The prototype of the game is built with html, css and JavaScript, including jQuery, along with a few images. The development plan is to incorporate a JavaScript head movement-tracking library so that head nods and head shakes can be substituted for choosing yes or no, respectively.

We envision this as a reusable tool, with a wizard that newsrooms could use to upload data and candidate information to customize it for local, state or national elections.

Design: The flow for the player is as follows:

1) The start screen includes a short explainer for the game, including an overview of the election and its candidates. The player selects a faceless avatar of a politician on the stump.

2) The player presses the start button to see the first question, chosen randomly from a set of questions related to campaign issues. A timer, giving the player 5 seconds to answer yes or no, begins. To the right is a chart, showing the player's current popularity rating, which begins at 50 percent. For each question, the player receives (or loses) points based on how closely his or her answer mirrors public opinion polls.

3) If the player fails to answer within the allotted time, he loses five points and the next question is displayed.

4) After 10 questions, the game ends. The player is shown her popularity score rating and a link to more detailed results.

5) The detailed results (currently a static mockup) will compare the player's responses with those of actual candidates and opinion poll respondents. It also will tell the player how many times he or she "waffled" -- or switched an answer on an issue when a similar question came up. It also will show links to previous reporting on the campaign issues and information about the candidates and the poll results.

Editorial Aspects: The demo version of the game is populated with questions on issues such as gun control, taxes, abortion, health care and entitlement spending. The scores a player gets for any answer are tied to actual national poll data reported by Gallup, the Pew Research Center and other news organizations. The game is currently configured for a hypothetical national election -- perhaps a Congressional midterm -- but could easily be adjusted to include questions of interest in a local race.

In a real deployment, news organizations that commission their own polls on issues could use that data to present public sentiment in a coverage area, as well as candidates and issues of relevance to any particular election campaign. On the results screen at the end of the game, where the player can compare his or her answers to actual candidates and polls, a news organization could also include links to coverage as a form of annotation.

You can play the game just to play it, but in the process you learn and understand the issues that can sway an election.

Planning: The full application may include an option to use head tracking as an interface as an alternative to simple yes or no buttons. In addition, there would be a wizard-like application to allow newsrooms to create editions of the game customized to their own elections.

Other items on the development roadmap include:
- Option to share my score on social media
- User administration with authentication via Facebook/Twitter
- A leader board of scores from players

Team Members: Tom Meagher, data editor
Nelson Hsu, graphics editor
Vaughn Hagerty, data developer