When is a game not a game? Because it's software designed to run on the Nintendo DS, Electroplankton and Animal Crossing: Wild World are packaged and sold as traditional games. Despite that, they don't have many of the elements we normally associate with games; Electroplankton has no measure of progress, and Animal Crossing is more Sims than SimCity. Neither of them have a win condition. While they may not be your normal Friday night rental, both of them are potent tools for having fun. Read on for my impressions of these distinctly different titles.

Monday we asked Jonah Seiger and Shabbir Safdar of Mindshare Internet Campaigns a bunch of questions about effective online political activism. Here are their answers. (They skipped two questions. Perhaps they'll explain why on the message boards later today.)