A June 10 Washington Post column features The Redistricting Game, a video game USC communication professor Douglas Thomas helped develop to illustrate the gerrymandering process, which involves manipulating electoral district boundaries for political advantage.

"No game has ever made me think about the political process before, it's safe to say, but this one has me a little concerned about how the system works," the column's author, Mike Musgrove, wrote. "And that's the idea."

The game is part of an emerging genre of games designed to make a social or political point while educating players about a real-world situation.

"A new, free game developed by a team at the University of Southern California makes a simple, quickly graspable point for those of us with short attention spans: It's not always the issues that determine the outcome of an election; it's how the congressional district map was drawn in the first place," Musgrove wrote.

Communication professor Jonathan Aronson, who was an advisor for the project, said he hoped the game would help shift Americans' worry from voting-machine tampering to more fundamental problems such as redistricting.

"My question was, why would you need to rig the voting machines if you'd already rigged the election by making seats safe?" Aronson said.

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