In 2023, the Library of Congress announced a challenge to help improve public knowledge of civics – that is, the rights and responsibilities of citizens – by asking video game developers to create fun, lightweight video games related to civics that incorporate Library of Congress resources.
Over the course of the challenge, we received many creative entries. Today, we are pleased to announce the winners and make the games available to the public to play. If you click on the links below, you should be able to play the games on a desktop computer equipped with a web browser. Note that some of them may take a moment to load.
Felicia Yan’s Duck Duty has taken first place. In Duck Duty, you play a duck that collects eggs containing images, sourced from Library collections, of what will become the Bill of Rights. You then take the proposed amendments to the legislature to begin the process of ratification. After ratification, you head over to the United States Supreme Court to test your knowledge of how some of amendments were applied in some landmark Supreme Court cases.
Nicolas Morales placed second with Townsprings. In this game, you play as a shopkeeper who has moved out West in light of the Homestead Act. The gameplay centers around setting prices for, trading, and selling goods. The cut scenes in the game involve using civics-related concepts to solve problems in your new town.
Thomas Chester and Henry Cram’s Pillars of Persuasion won third place. This game is primarily concerned with women’s suffrage, with players walking around various scenes in a town square seeking to convince their political opponents to support suffrage. The cut scenes in between each level feature animations of several well-known suffragettes, as well as Frederick Douglass, and contain dialogue drawn from materials in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.
We hope you enjoy the games. Thank you to the Friends of the Library of Congress for making this contest possible, and to everyone who took the time to submit an entry to this contest!
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Comments
Thank you to all who submitted games — I am sure they each were fun to make and play. Congratulations to the winning submissions! I played all three and found ways in which each was the best. Being a lawyer, I greatly appreciated Duck Duty’s deceptively easy gameplay combined with a more sophisticated look at what happens when a simple law is applied to everyday people.