We’re all about local politics at the Bangor Daily News. And there’s no politics more local than at town meetings across Maine.
Many of them happened in March, but it’s still town meeting season with more scheduled into June. It made us want to come up with an ode to this form of direct democracy with the newspaper as a central character.
So we came up with the fictional town of Newsville, training Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence model on real warrants and Maine law to create a text-based game that takes you through a simplified town meeting. It’s also an outlandish scenario. Hardball politics is afoot, and scandal and missteps lurk around every corner.
Take over our rival characters and see if you can make the right decisions around a hot-button local issue, winning over voters at their doors and your community by the end.