I've put together a .csv (comma-separated file) with the results I pulled off of Twitter for the first 48 hours of the Iranian election events. Be aware--it's about 20MB. Hopefully, many of you will find this useful in your own research. The columns are tweet id, date and time, text, profile image path, twitter username, twitter user id, and twitter user id of the immediate "reply to" (note that, in my graph analysis, I keep track of all @'s in the message, not just the first one as Twitter does. Only that first id is listed in the data file.)

If you've read my swineflu analysis, some of this should make sense. I ran a search on '#iranelection OR Tehran OR Ahmadinejad OR Mousavi' in Twitter for the period between Friday and Sunday evening. From the 79,957 results I got back, below is some graph analysis of what came out.

I just finished reading Nicholas Lemann's article "Conflict of Interest" in the latest New Yorker. It crystallized a lot of the thinking I've done in the past few years about politics, all the way back to when I was an organizer for Democracy for America here in Hudson County.

I couldn't call my participation in the DFA effort as anything more than a failure, but it taught me a lot about the push and pull of real politics. As it turns out, I don't have a taste for that kind of work--I think I'm temperamentally unsuited for it. But it did drop the scales from my eyes. I stopping seeing the act of governing as a battle between good and evil, and, rather, saw it as the net result of conflicting and cooperating interests.

The Lemann article sums it up well, and I'd encourage anyone with an interest in the subject (or the engine) to read it. For me, it helped to gel a number of key components that ought to factor into games like this:

• Players should either represent an interest and compete for the attention of policy makers and the general public (Bentley's organizational interests)
• OR players should represent a policy maker who is beholden to interests--or, rather, requires the backing of a number of interests, none of which need be permanent or essential. A game of political survival rather than idealism.
• The game will involve, at its core, the pushing and pulling of different levers on a system.
• BUT this is NOT the game, no more than resetting a series of timers is Diner Dash
• Therefore, a game mechanic is needed that creates a sense of expressiveness, in Bogost's terms.
• And a narrative that explains the affordances of the "lever pushing" in the same way that waiting tables explains the timers in Nick's game.

That's what I have for now. More questions than answers at this point, but it makes sense for me to start taking apart some of the work from this spring's "iPod Game" and working out a mechanic for that kind system and logical interface.

So, I tend to blog about DT-related stuff only here, but I used to blog politics all the time, the bug has never left me.

Today one of the top stories on CNN.com is all about Al Gore's power bill. It's high. Like 20 times that of average Americans. Gracious me! That's terrible! What a hypocrite! We should immediately disregard every word this man has ever uttered about the environment!

Heh. So, this news was brought to us by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. "The wha?" you ask. Right. Never heard of it before, and you'll likely never hear from it again, at least until the next smear on Gore. I mean, come on, how great a need is there for a think tank researching Tennessee policy? That is, if raising a shitstorm about Al Gore's power bill can be called policy research.