Mortgage Meltdown is a very cool news game
I hadn’t been by addicting games for a while, but this was a pleasant find there.
Mortgage Meltdown – Free Strategy Game from AddictingGames!.
I started mentioning news games at Addicting games years ago. Most of their games fell into what I called the political cartoon category, and I was making the case in my talks that game cartoons are indeed journalism. If taken in historical context like Punch magazine of hundreds of years ago, satire and commentary are a natural early step for news games.
Mortgage Meltdown is another big step, though. This AP article has a few quotes from David Williams, the SVP of Nickelodeon’s Kids and Damily Games Group, which includes AddictingGames. Paraphrasing (since we can’t clip AP copy), he says the game is one of the deepest they’ve ever produced in the News Game category.
I like very much that Williams says anything can be turned into a game, but the trick in finding inspiration in the headlines is finding events that have legs and don’t become irrelevant. While AddictingGames designers are encouraged to be provocative, they must work a fine line in regards to material that could be considered inappropriate.