video vidi visum : virtual

One commenter nicely harmonized these two presentations as both calling for games to be games, but in many other respects Zimmerman and Thompson were coming at this question from opposite directions.

Zimmerman’s approach resonated with me: he identified “systems thinking” (which I recently found critical to modern legal practice) as a key affordance of games that most G4C developers are overlooking. He provoked the audience to aspire for better games with examples of genre-changing works (A People’s History of the United States, Maus). While he rejected my terminology in the Q&A session, I continue to see his appeal as for a level of sophisticated artistry in gaming. (When you use the Pulitzer prize-winning Maus as an example, it seems implied). To me this is not marginalizing but rather valorizing such efforts: at its best, art and literature call humanity to greater aspiration.

In answering his question (“Where are all the good games for change?”), Zimmerman points to Electrocity (which he prefers to pronounce to rhyme with “atrocity”) as a nascent example of what could be.

Thompson took the opposite tack by starting with “grassroots” (what some might consider “lowbrow”) games — games he compared with graffiti, raw responses to a raw world. Critiquing designers’ apparent preference for sim games — and specifically taking aim at SimCity for setting the bar for all G4C ever since — Thompson suggested that quick, dirty, to-the-gut games are what’s needed. Rather, he held up WTC Defender (can’t seem to find it, but here’s an article about its removal) as an ideal type of this genre. It’s a provocative point, but I don’t buy that WTC Defender is a game for change, nor that it’s a good model for the G4C movement to build off. It’s readable as a G4C only using Thompson’s interpretation: that, because the player is bound to lose eventually, it’s critiquing the notion that we can defend ourselves through military might. Perhaps that’s true if you can frame the game properly (Food Import Folly uses the manic quality of classic games to make a similar point), but even so the point is a relatively naive one.

In an age of increasing complexity, polarized debates such as those that would be engendered by games like WTC Defender can add fuel to the fire, generating more smoke to obscure the difficult issues we face. If existing games for change suck, it’s not because they are too earnest, but because they aren’t fun. Irony can take the sting out of poor execution, but irony provides only a single note at a time when social change demands an entire range. Yes, we need spoofs, satires, and parodies to discomfit the powerful, but we also need subtlety, complexity, and even earnestness to point the way to a new future.

G4C presentation: Where are all the good games for change?
G4C presentation: Grass Roots Gaming
G4C presentation: Zimmerman / Thompson Q&Q

Panelists Alex Chisholm ([ICE]3 Studios); Eric Brown (ImpactGames); Stephen Friedman (mtvU); moderated by Heather Chaplin (Smart Bomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution).

An interesting panel that, among other topics, played with the question of how games could get funded under different for-profit, not-for-profit, and non-profit models. I would have liked to have heard more about plugging G4C into existing commercial properties, or as Heather had suggested last year, subverting existing commercial games.

G4C panel : Market-Sector Impact (42:39, 40MB)

In the next few posts I’ll be publishing audio recordings from the 4th annual Games for Change festival with some commentary from myself when I have any.

Keynote speech by Chris Melissinos, Chieg Gaming Officer at Sun Microsystems (June 11, 2007).

As I mentioned in my last post, as the world becomes more complex, our need to understand it through new media that can convey complexity grows. I was excited to learn that the New York Times is now publishing Persuasive Games‘ “newsgames” — a casual game about the FDA’s role in food inspections. This historic arrangement puts games smack on the editorial pages of the nation’s paper of record*… an amazing coup for Ian Bogost’s crew at Georgia Tech.

The game itself is relatively simple: the idea is to use your two food inspectors to inspect incoming shipments or to research the origins of food contamination. Each activity takes a certain amount of time. The purpose of inspecting a container is to interdict contaminated food:

If contaminated food slips through, researching the contamination can identify what food caused the contamination. This suggests that the next few batches of that same food are likely to also be contaminated.

There are five different types of food. Clearing each year (level) requires the player to deploy the two inspectors intelligently, inspecting different food types and then concentrating on contaminated food until they become safe again. (Then another food type will get contaminated). The strategy is very simple, and the pace of the game accelerates significantly at each year/level.

As a game “Food Import Folly” provides maybe 10-15 minutes of entertainment. It also, as its name suggests, offers a critique of the current funding and staffing of FDA inspection services. As the opening screen describes, the amount of food that the FDA inspects has gone from 2 to 9 million shipments since 1997 to today, yet the FDA’s budget remains essentially the same.

“Food Import Folly” is a great marriage of traditional and interactive advocacy media. My wish for the genre — besides expansion — is that they add more nuance and sophistication to the editorial pages. Nowadays, good editorial cartoons distill difficult issues and feelings into a pithy and “truthy” image. By contrast, the power of interactive media is to emphasize complexity, systems, and decision-making. FIF touches on strategic decision-making, but its core mechanic turns, ultimately, on twitch reflexes. Still, its madcap quality — not unlike Lucy’s chocolate factory — makes the point nicely. I’m eager to see what directions Persuasive Media will take its games in the coming months.

* Times Select required — now free to anyone with a .edu email address.