PlayDecide is a multiplayer "game" that puts players into decision-making roles about certain timely issues (nanotechnology, HIV, etc. -- they have a whole list on their site). However, I question its ability to engage players in a dialogue about what these issues mean to society and how they should be rethought in lieu of certain ideological positions. In an effort to find solutions to this problem, I chose to re-envision the game as a single-player exercise that asks users to choose paths through the decision-making process, thereby allowing them to analyze their point-of-view.

http://www.jameslamiell.com/asc/decide/

After logging in or creating a profile through the service, the player is given a choice to follow one of three paths: agreement, neutrality, or disagreement with a certain decision (the current iteration only includes the topic of nanotechnology). The next screen contains several other paths related to that line of thinking; if you chose agreement, for example, you would be given several specific forms of agreement to choose related to a variety of issues like medicine, manufacturing, etc. Upon choosing that variation, a new square would appear in your home version, and if you choose to continue in that specificity, you can click on that new square and go further along that line of reasoning.

The fully finished version would ideally have several levels of specificity, so that towards the end of the experience the user would have a home screen containing the color that most represents that person's ideological POV. That image can then be visualized with a word map and (this isn't yet functional) ported to a social networking site as a view of this person's POV for their social network to see. Comparisons could be made between friends, arguments could be formed via these visualizations -- the bottom line is that this media enhancement allows for a single player to have a visual artifact of their own decision-making process that they can then carry with them and present to an audience of either like-minded or different-minded individuals or groups for discussion in a way that PlayDecide does not allow.