uGov Reaches Launch Day

PR Log (Press Release) – Apr 13, 2009 – AUCKLAND, WELLINGTON & CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand & OLYMPIA, WA, United States of America. April 14, 2009, The uGov administration team are pleased to announce the official launch of uGov the New Zealand Political Simulator.

uGov is a forum based debating game that also allows whoever is the strongest debating team to carry out their policy and see and defend the outcomes of it. It differs from other pol sims by scoring debates which allows players to influence the electorate and in this way allows opens up a huge amount of player driven gameplay. While the Media play a role in uGov, the debaters will always have more potential influence then a spinner. This is to ensure that we have a debate rather then just a battle of spin.

Set in 1996, It is 13 October 1996 and the General Election results have just come in, it looks like the Government could fall either to the Left with Labour or to the Right with National. Now it is time for the first MMP coalition negotiations to take place. But with the new electoral system comes new leaders for the parties. These need to be elected as all of the former leaders have left Parliament and lost the leadership of their parties as the new electoral system left the parties split and the leadership teams could not manage.

The official launch is the sign of hours of hard work by the Administration Team. Christopher Downs, uGov Systems Administrator said “Reaching launch day for the uGov Team is a huge milestone, many hours of planning and conversation has gone into this project to make it a success and reaching launch day is a huge leap forward, something of which the whole team is extremely proud of.”

Mr Downs continued to comment how there has been amazing growth in the player base since the site was opened in a Pre Launch phase on 24 March. “The team worked hard over several days to get the site into a pre-launch phase, this is where players could register and explore a pre-launch forum to learn how the game will operate”

The uGov team notes the great success in hits to the site, since implementing visitor tracking on March 27th the site has seen a little over 1,400 hits with over 35% of these being unique visitors.  

The site is attracting an international presence too with hits from New Zealand, United States, UK, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, Singapore, Argentina and Denmark.  

uGov has gone into launch day full steam ahead with a whole new layout for the forum and just over 100 players registered, just shy of the 120 required to full a New Zealand Parliament.

uGov players are now working hard to pull a coalition together and become the first government and PM.  New players can join in at www.ugov.co.nz

-ENDS-

About uGov

uGov is a forum based debating game that also allows whoever is the strongest debating team to carry out their policy and see and defend the outcomes of it. It differs from other pol sims by scoring debates which allows players to influence the electorate and in this way allows opens up a huge amount of player driven gameplay.

While the Media play a role in uGov, the debaters will always have more potential influence then a spinner. This is to ensure that we have a debate rather then just a battle of spin.

Our goal in creating this game is to help anyone who is interested to get involved NZ's parliamentary system by opening up the life of an MP to a people of all ages from all backgrounds and of all political persuasions over the internet.