 | MTV News – Can Social-Change Video Games Tackle Divorce, Poverty, Genocide?June 29th, 2006 |
MTV has posted their take on the Games for Change conference, including my talk. The tone of the article is really interesting, and I get the impression that the reporter is one who resented some of the cold water he says I threw on the proceedings. He asks,
The first knock on anyone criticizing games is that they possibly haven’t played them. It wasn’t clear if Koster had attended the Tuesday-night game expo and sampled some of the activism in action. Had he played “Peacemaker,” a strategy game that tasks players with settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by steering the leadership of either side? Had he tried “Earthquake in Zipland,” a cartoonish game that stars a moose trying to assemble a giant zipper to merge the separate islands upon which his parents are drifting apart, an extended metaphor about divorce?
Had Koster played the prototype of “The Organizing Game,” which is designed to teach grassroots activists basic skills like recognizing which doors in the neighborhood are the good ones to knock on? Had he tried “Homelessness: It’s No Game,” a simple game that challenges players to keep their homeless character alive and out of trouble for 24 hours of video game time? Did he harbor no enthusiasm for Ian Bogost’s anti-Kinko’s game, “Disaffected” (see “Game Lets Players Step Into Toner-Stained Shoes Of Kinko’s Workers”)?
And had Koster not been encouraged by the announcements earlier Tuesday, when mtvU General Manager Stephen Friedman announced his network will issue 10 $25,000 grants to college students making games for change? MtvU had sponsored the creation of the Sudan awareness game “Darfur Is Dying” and, Friedman announced, will launch a student-made game called “Squeezed” that depicts the lives of immigrant farm workers — a “first-person picker” — on mtvU.com in September.
No, I didn’t see the expo. Yes, I was already familiar with many of the games shown. And yes, I think that Ian’s Disaffected? is pretty fun, too. I also applaud what MTV is doing in this regard.
But.
There’s basically two ways to approach games for change.
- One is simple awareness-raising. Awareness raising is fine, and perhaps games let you reach a different audience that you otherwise would. But then you are firmly in the arena of propaganda (not using that word in any negative sense here) and you will have all of the strengths and weaknesses of propaganda — and likely, few of the strengths of games. If this is how you are planning to use games, it is absolutely critical that the games be fun, or else you will fail to connect with the large audience that you seek. This is what the vast majority of games for social change are doing and seek to do — raising of awareness of issues. Nothing wrong with that.
A huge part of the problem with social change work is precisely this: that it fails to connect with an audience. It is earnest, rigid, dogmatic, holier-than-thou, and depressing. The article cites conference founder Suzanne Seggerman saying that the games biz is risk-averse, which is certainly true — but I can tell you that the people in the games biz are by and large still concerned about social issues. They’re not heartless. They’re like most people — too uninvolved to get up and do something, and too concerned with their own welfare to spend a lot of time on issues that are far away.
Most critically, the games biz spends all of its time paying very close attention to “what gets the largest number of people to play.” And earnest, rigid, dogmatic, holier-than-thou, and depressing are not on that list anymore than they are on the list for pop singers or Hollywood. Nobody likes to be lectured at. This is a big part of the disdain that many in the industry have for academic and artsy game design — that it leaves the audience behind.
- The other way to use games for social change is to leverage what games do better than other media, what they are, which is the way in which they are abstracted simplified models of systems. And here, as in pretty much every other art form, succumbing too much to propagandistic tendencies will be bad art. What the best games for change can offer is an avenue towards solutions, because they are models that can be used to approximate the problem and try things out. In fact, the more unbiased the model, the more likely it is that something useful will emerge (by contrast, propagandistic models, like Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th, will intentionally distort or bias the model in order to make their statement — again, raising awareness is a perfectly valid approach, so I am not knocking this). This is part of what I was urging the attendees to think about.
I’ve spent enough time at themed conferences to know that pouring cold water on things is usually necessary — just as it was at the Metaverse Summit. Does it mean that I don’t believe in the possibilities? Of course not. In fact, it’s sort of odd to be painted as somehow the industry insider opposed to games for social change; after all, I’m the industry guy who was actually willing to show up at the conference in the first place.
Rather, what it means is that it’s all too easy to try tackling famine, war, and poverty from a posh apartment, all too easy to sum up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a facile statement; all too easy to rely on “raising consciousness” as an answer to real social change; and all too easy to think that “oh, we’ll make a game and it’ll connect with the kids.” The cold water is needed, because it takes a greater focus than that to really do the work. I know many of the people who were there know that, because they have done the work and they know there aren’t facile answers. I know it, because as I said in the speech, a very large portion of my family does exactly that for a career.
In the speech, I said
It’s almost like if you were a paper-airplane maker and somebody came up to you and said, ‘You know, paper airplanes, it seems like all the kids are into them at school these days. So we really want to make paper airplanes about Darfur.’
One needs to ask these questions about such a proposition, if one is serious about the cause or about paper airplanes.
- Is this the best way to spend money on Darfur?
- What special service can paper airplanes supply that Hula Hoops or Sea Monkeys (or food and medicine) cannot?
- Is this the best use of paper airplanes, or are they served better by being used to teach aerodynamics instead?
It’s not that there isn’t a match to be made; there very well may be. But you have to have those answers in your mind from the beginning to do justice to the problem.
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[...] 총 15개 | 최종업데이트: 2006-06-30 14:47 function PrevPage(goto_bottom) { } function NextPage(goto_top) { } MTV News – Can Social-Change Video Games Tackle Divorce, Poverty, Genocide? Raph 2006-06-30 13:36 작성 | Games [...]
[...] Raph Koster rocked the house in the closing keynote (which I wish had come earlier) by challenging the core notion of games for change and the ability of games to even come close to representing the world’s worst problems accurately, let alone not trivialize them (speaking about genocide, endemic poverty, and political corruption). But then he stood this on its head suggesting that it may be just because games and simulations can hack outrageously overwhelming problems into tiny, abstract, tractable pieces that they might stir the will power and confidence to make real change. More from Raph on this right here. I was on the “Virtual World, Real Change” panel with Pathfinder Linden from Linden Lab/Second Life, Barry Joseph from Global Kids, and Lauren Gellman from Stanford. The podcast of this and all sessions should be up in a couple of weeks. [...]
[...] MTV News – Can Social-Change Video Games Tackle Divorce, Poverty, Genocide? Gaming industry guru Raph Koster responds to MTV comments.read more | digg story [...]
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[...] (8) In response to an MTV News article about his closing address at the Games for Change conference, Raph Koster admits that Disaffected is “pretty fun.” [...]
[...] July Kim Flintoff11:05 amAdd comment Over at MTV they are commenting on Raph Koster’s talk and other speculation at the Games for Change conference last month. Apparently all was cheery and hopeful until Raph delivere his final keynote that some felt dashed the hopes of the attendees. Raph’s blog offers an interesting rejoinder where he advises that it isn’t thta he is opposed to the ida of creating games that are geared to bringing about positive social change, nor does he believe a futile exercise; rather he is concerned that there is too much lip service given in the form of platitudes and very little real consideration of the problem at hand. I’ve spent enough time at themed conferences to know that pouring cold water on things is usually necessary — just as it was at the Metaverse Summit. Does it mean that I don’t believe in the possibilities? Of course not. In fact, it’s sort of odd to be painted as somehow the industry insider opposed to games for social change; after all, I’m the industry guy who was actually willing to show up at the conference in the first place. [...]
[...] carrying Google ads on the page, then they somehow recoup the cost of the Google ad? Puzzling…] # posted by Ben : 6:19 PM Games for Change (G4C) [Organisers of a conference ongames, etc] # posted by Ben : 6:14 PM Raphs Website — MTV News – Can Social-Change Video GamesPoverty, Genocide? [Are "persuasive games" (for example, the Darfur is Dying game) just a gimmick?] # posted by Ben : 5:37 PM Water Cooler Games – Newsgames Archives [The Zidane Flasha category called "newsgames" at Water Cooler Games. Dick Cheney hunting games are there, too...] # posted by Ben : 5:00 PM Persuasive Gaming: Third World Farmer viagame Third World Farmer online – its not exactly a barrel of laughs, but its message is clear.” # posted by Ben : 3:11 PM NGO Security: “Although some within the NGO community arepractitioner (just swap the word ‘information’ for ‘intelligence’ if you’re uncomfortable).” # posted by Ben : 2:19 PM [...]
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