Voting Arcade begins where videogames began, with Pong. The end screen from their adaptation, called Hanging Pong, encapsulates the overarching rhetoric of the series:

The game plays exactly like a Pong clone, without any contextual re-skinning. The only change is a query that pops up at the bottom of the screen each time paddle meets ball. These convey the apprehension of a potential voter, running through a mental questioning about where the polling place is located, what the key issues are, whether one's registration is in order, and what candidates represent each political party. This back-and-forth action conjures the mentality of a voter pretty accurately, considering the mental dialogue we all undertake when trying to decide whether we think our vote will count or if we have the time to dip out of work to sit in line at the polls all day.

The series quickly moves from clever meditation to utter frustration through the liberal application of the rhetoric of failure: even if the player can reach the end of these games, which they usually can't, they'll be lectured on the futility of honest civic activity under the oppression of an archaic political machine.

Dig Dug Kellner is a stripped-down version of the original, featuring the iconic mining protagonist and theme music but none of its other mechanics. The player simply moves around running into rocks representing the many different ridiculous aspects of the voting apparatus including language limitations, a mandatory 25-day pre-registration period, misplaced (and sometimes nonexistent) registration applications, and untrained poll workers. The lack of authentic Dig Dug mechanics makes the game feel broken, and that's the point: this a broken voting system with key functionalities missing that would be required to make the process fair and democratic.

Another completely broken game in the Voting Arcade that isn't saved by being a metaphor is Poli-Tetris, a gerrymandering game. Garishly-colored voting districts slowly descend over a map of the state, and the player has to rotate and place them without any guidelines or auto-locking. We get it: gerrymandering sucks. There are other ways that the argument could've been made in game form, and this work misses the mark. The liberal use of bright pink and yellow tiles, matched with a necessarily jumbled and confusing end screen, makes it look like an absurdist art piece.

PACman is an exact replica of Pac-Man with money standing in for power pellets. "PAC" stands for Political Action Committee, one of the largest sources of campaign funding since the first one was established in 1944 to help re-elect FDR. The signature fruit of Pac-Man, which pop up just below the ghost pen, are here replaced by icons representing the biggest federal PACs from 2000: trial lawyers, medical associations, teachers' unions, the NRA, and... beer wholesalers. Every time a ghost catches up to PACman, the game presents the player with a famous quote from a politician deriding the prime importance of funding in the U.S. election process:

Donkey Con (Elephant Evasion) is a re-skinned Donkey Kong about confronting incumbent officeholders for the hearts and minds of lazy constituents. Each tier of the infamous Kong tower represents a different set of obstacles for the challenger: ballot access, party politics, name recognition, the "incumbent powers" of media relationships, and campaign cash. Unlike in the original, the challenger can't get a hammer power-up to smash through the descending perils. There is a custom "death" message for each tier, giving concrete examples of the abstract obstacles to contextualize every failure.

Curiously, there is a (not-so-secret) exploit in the game: an invisible ladder, representing running as a Reform candidate, provides a protected route from the bottom level to the top. The message there is that most of the obstacles have to do with the controlling influence of the two dominant parties; for somebody running on a Reform ticket, the Gazette argues, campaign cash is the only major concern.

But this wouldn't be an early editorial game with some kind of cruel twist at the end. Even if the player makes it all the way to the couch potato Princess (a voter), a message appears to deliver a deadly factoid about the entire effort:

The Gazette returned again to the futility of toppling incumbents in 2009, with a maze game called Bump the Birds. This wasn't the first maze that they developed; they made one in 2008 about the mayor's budget called Budget Maze, but it doesn't appear to be functional anymore. Bump the Birds lets you select from a number of independent candidates seeking to get on the ballot for an upcoming election. The player moves through a convoluted series of corridors ending in decision points that quiz her on the nuances of signature-gathering and paperwork-filing. By answering incorrectly or getting lost in the maze, the player loses valuable time. If the deadline is reached before the player exits the maze, she fails to get her name on the ballot.

Also, if the player hasn't accrued enough points by the end, through finding decision points and selecting the correct answers, then she won't be able to appeal to the state Supreme Court when the incumbent challenges their petition. Unlike most of the other Gotham Gazette's games, this one can end on a high note. Perhaps this reflects a change in the system between 2004 and 2009 (there was a federally-mandated update in 2006).

If most of these games seem like Debbie Downers with no substantive solutions for the problems they lay bare, it's because they are. Gotham Gazette is quite open about the fact that they use these games to drive traffic to their site; in a reply to one angry commenter, a GG moderator directed the complaint to their forum on future game development and the relevant articles and editorials related to the game. The mod explains that they want to get the information contained in these games out to as many people as possible; games are just one way to draw in those typically less interested in thumbing through newspaper headlines.

While something like Wired online's recent feature on Somali piracy is preferable to an endless repetition of the now-tired rhetoric of failure, we have to remember that a significant effort has gone to match the mechanics of these games to their message; they deliver factoids in consumable bits rather than walls of text; and they accompany every game with at least one traditional prose piece (sometimes up to four). The thematic linking of an ancient election apparatus with retro games makes sense, and it's a joy to spend a few minutes with each to see how they pan out. It's like a cynical version of the cherished edutainment software of my youth, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? As a non-resident of NYC, I learned quite a bit about the political environment of the city through play.

The Gotham Gazette is very much a child of the Internet, so it's heartening to see them embrace digital content where more august institutions dare not tread. Best of all is that the staff of the paper designed the games themselves (though they hired contract programmers for the mazes). These might not be the future of newsgames, but they're as solid a proof of concept as any that a mainstream news source can benefit from (and thrive in) ludic content. They show us how to succeed and how to fail. By probing at a minimalism of contextualization and re-skinning, they help define the line behind half-assed clone and proper procedural translation.