System: Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift & Windows MR
Price at Time Of Review: Free
Comfort Rating: Green
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
VR Shop Score 1/100: 60
Description: Gerrymander Madness places gamers into a fictional North Carolina legislator’s office and allows them to manipulate the districts of a state map to gain political advantage for a chosen party. Players score points as they gain control of districts and disenfranchise voters of the opposing party. Gerrymander Madness demonstrates how gerrymandering undermines democracy. It was built by CrossComm in partnership with the Greensboro History Museum for the museum’s Project Democracy 20/20 exhibition.
Review: ‘Gerrymander Madness’ seems to be some sort of political opinion wrapped in a war simulation scenario. For those of us who don’t know Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish an unfair political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries, which is most commonly used in first-past-the-post electoral systems. While I have zero interest in American politics I found this app oddly interesting and I can kind of see the point of it. If this wasn’t free I would have suggested giving it a miss, but if it sounds like something you might like you can give it a go without feeling out of pocket.