Gamestar guy here.. we've found a bunch of studies on gaming and game design and its correlation to STEM skills and higher order thinking skill development. In fact, Gamestar Mechanic began with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to explore whether a game could teach game design concepts and help kids acquire critical and systems thinking skills. On our site, we have available for download two PHD dissertations written about Gamestar and how skills learned in game design transfer into positive life and academic skills.

http://cdn.gamestarmechanic.com/1.24b/pdfs/Games_PhD_Gamestar.pdf
and
http://cdn.gamestarmechanic.com/1.24b/pdfs/Torres_PhD_Gamestar.pdf

I work on programming Gamestar Mechanic and wanted to clarify: Gamestar has free and premium versions (and free versions are free and not time bounded, i.e. not just free trials). Premium versions for consumers are $5.95. In schools, a free version for classroom use is also available (also not time bounded and account for about 85% of the educational use) and premium versions are deeply discounted (i.e. $8.95 for an entire class per month) for educational use.

One of us ImpactGamers here!

The article mentions PeaceMaker, but it doesn't mention PlayTheNews.. which seems much more relevant to the 'gaming the news' topic.

There are still a bunch of relevant games on the PlayTheNews website, so it is still worth checking out if you have not seen it yet.
http://www.playthenewsgame.com/portal/game.action?gameTurnId=246 (addressing bible translations and homosexuality)
and
http://www.playthenewsgame.com/portal/game.action?gameTurnId=188 (arguing if the drinking age should be lowered)
are a few of the more interesting ones.

I don't know why these articles skip over PlayTheNews. It's pretty much exactly what the authors are talking about and it never gets a mention. They are not making any new games, but there are still some really interesting ones on the site to play.

It would be nice if the smaller games let you actually manage virtual troops around, but since we aim at predicting real news events, we try to get these published within a few hours. The time between us finishing the Gaza game and the result happening in the real world was less than a day! PeaceMaker does the deeper 'virtual world' type gameplay, but we cant do daily updates to something like that the way we can with a web based game.

I think that is the best feature of using interactivity in presenting the news. You can show multiple sides of a story in a way that is very difficult to do in traditional journalism. Make sure you check out the 'advisors' when you submit an opinion. While the core of the game is presented as neutrally as possible, they get to be nice and biased :)

By the way, we are the company that did the PeaceMaker game http://www.peacemakergame.com/ where you get to play as the Palestinian President and the Israeli Prime Minister and work to find a peaceful solution. There's a demo there if you are interested.

Games can change the face of journalism while still giving you your text and images. You can use the medium to make the news more informative and give broader perspectives while keeping all the information inline. While I agree we dont have a lot of time to spend reading the news, the deeper part of news is what gets lost in our RSS feed reading, sensational headline, bit story culture. I work for a company that does interactive news. We try to report real facts in a videogame vocabulary because we think it gives you a better and deeper understanding faster. http://www.playthenewsgame.com/

Wow... the haunts in Thief. I had to turn the game off at that point. Its the only game that ever freaked me out. Played it again years later as a jaded programmer and thought 'I could make that sound in CoolEdit, damnit'