Health care reform satire game “Death Panel” comes to the iPhone

Casting a satirical view on the healthcare reform debate, the comic Death Panel game is debuting on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch devices today.
Made by developer People Operating Technology, the game tests a user’s knowledge of healthcare reform. It takes its title from the much-discussed “death panels” that reform opponents latched onto early on, saying that President Obama favored panels of experts who decided who lives or who dies among patients. If it were serious, the game would be a slam against Obama. But it treats the subject with tongue in cheek and is by and large politically neutral.
The game incorporates third-party facts about healthcare reform into a quiz game. When the game is over, players are encouraged to share their scores online with friends via Facebook and Twitter. The hope is to drive awareness and comprehension on the most important social and economic issue of the day, said Jason Petralia, co-founder of Boston-based People Operating Technology.
“We made Death Panel to shed some light on a hot topic in a compelling way,” Petralia said.
I haven’t played this game, but I can see why someone would make it. As we noted at our DiscoveryBeat event (pictures here), it’s still extremely hard to get noticed on the iPhone, where there are more than 119,000 apps and 22,000 games. (This game is getting noticed because the associates of Vijay Chattha, chief talker at Applaunch PR and one of our DiscoveryBeat speakers, showed it to me at the event).
If you can get your game covered in the press, then that may make a difference. And what better way to get a game noticed than to make it topical and controversial? That happens a lot in the Flash game market, where many developers have learned to churn out a game in less than a month. The iPhone development cycle is equally short.
To the degree that the game is serious, it’s part of the Serious Games effort to use games for purposes beyond entertainment. The game notes that the number of uninsured people in the U.S. increased last year from 45.7 million in 2007 to 46.3 million. The percentage of children under 18 without health insurance was 9.9 percent.
Death Panel puts a user in the role of a local politician who has to build a strong constituency. The user must stand on a virtual platform and answer questions correctly about the healthcare reform issue. The game has an integrated location-based feature where players can look up info on real-life politicians in their region. The company was founded earlier this year as an iPhone app creator. It has created other apps including Wildfire Fighter, Kero the Frog, the Fun Time Series, AudioPeople, and Blockdrop iCon Trick.