[...] Where is games’ Alan Moore? I was reading Raph Koster’s post about my article where I quote him, (proving the media really does talk to itself too much) and it got me thinking about games as evolving along similar lines as comics. He talks about games outside of the usual formats ranging from political statements to audio poetry. And he makes a very good point- a computer game is a medium. He’s starting to make that point before the medium has grown up, whereas I think Scott McCloud made that point (very articulately) about the funny picture books in Understanding Comics well after the medium had really matured. [...]

I tried to force myself to go through the menus…and it was too contrived, and too awful — the idea that you’d be conned into thinking you were “doing something” or “raising your awareness” by this strange little removed and remote exercise. The drop-downs of appeals to your Congressman were strange useless artifacts, bereft of the realization that you don’t get to Congressman that way, really; calling and faxing are more effective.

Seeing the generic family with their names, lined up like Sims, I felt really turned off. I just don’t think this works — at all. I’d feel a deep sense of shame if a real Darfurian refugee family saw me minimizing their plight like this with this hugely artificial notion that I was helping them by doing this game.

Games like this can help with the process of teaching a lot of people how to discard bad ideas quickly. A modern type of gameplay might be able to prove that certain types of conflict sollutions are not worth investing your voting power into.

Games may use simulations in order to encode interesting external systems into them but I do not think that they are themselves simulations. And typically the simulations that games use are poor when judged by their predictive power. The priority to create something that is managle, understandable by a player and works well within the framework of the game overrides the necessity of correctly modelling something real.

In this sense, when using somewhat compromised simulations, the creators personal beliefs become important. Simulating the economy of a 3rd world country is simply too hard to do correctly for a game and might be too complex to be fun for a player and so a game like Hidden Agenda is going to have to cop out and create a crude and inaccurate representation. As it’s up to the creator to figure out where to take shortcuts and what assumptions to make, the creator’s ideas get transferred into the game.

Ideally a learning game needs a more scientifically verified simulation to back it up. I think that a game like Fish Banks would want to claim to have this. A simulation relying on verified, peer-reviewed techniques which are known to have a certain degree of accuracy can be reasonable believed to be independent of outside bias. Unfortunately, such techniques are going to be very sparse for some of the more interesting conflicts and ideas that a game might like to explore.

For a number of years I used something in MBA and undergraduate classes which is a game and a simulation [both in its descriptions and in the sense that Slyfiend used]. The current incarnation can be seen here

http://www.bsg-online.com/

I no longer use it. Why? In a nutshell, its a very good tool but not the best tool. People here are gaming professionals and ‘insiders’ so I can understand the enthusiasm about expanding the outer bounds of games and gaming. But in your enthusiam try to remember that there are other media, other mechanisms. Games and simulations can be very good tools but there are other tools in the toolkit.

(That’s not a hard-and-fast distinction; it’s possible to define “seeing what happens” as “winning,” in which case you could reasonably discuss a sim as a game. Most of the time, however, the two approaches are distinct.)

I’m also open to defining “fun” as something other than a struggle for dominance, but that’s just me. Most gamers aren’t like me — most gamers (I believe; I’m open to data showing otherwise) are Achiever-types who most certainly do define fun as “winning,” as beating an opponent, and who expect their games to be rules-based competitions that can be won.

If game propagandists want to focus on me, then sure, they can define fun as something other than the thrill of victory over a foe and still have a chance of getting their message through. But I’m just one guy; persuading me won’t accomplish much. It’s persuading the masses that matters… and to do that, you have to deal with the masses on their own terms.

And their terms are that “games” are a dominance-oriented entertainment experience — they’re about having fun through beating an opponent. To focus on providing something other than that as your primary product but still insist on calling it a “game” is to mislabel your product.

Which is the kind of thing that tends to upset consumers once they realize it, so it’s probably not an optimal strategy for persuading people to your point of view. Calling it a game may attract the masses to hear your message, but if they decide that you weren’t honest about what they were buying then they can only be more likely to ignore or reject your message.

It may be hard to accept that being honest about what you’re offering means that fewer people will try your product. But what if doing so increases the probability that those who try your product will listen to the message?

Or are those with a message to push so convinced of the rightness of their cause that any means of reaching users — including deliberately mislabeling their educational message as a game — seems justified?

Is “It’s for their own good” thinking OK for game developers if it’s not OK for others?

I can’t believe I’m getting into another potential definition tussle, but meh. Can’t resist, either.

I think you just defined this particular blogosphere right there.

I like how games are a subset of a simulation; I’d add that games need victory/defeat conditions, while simulations don’t.

I can’t believe I’m getting into another potential definition tussle, but meh. Can’t resist, either.

I would say that all games are subsets of simulations. However, in terms of connotations by the words, games are frequently more abstract and simulations more specific; neither should be a definitional requirement. What makes a simulation a game, I think, is the ability to determine your own destiny, but the extent to which you can do that goes across this amazingly long continuum such that there frequently isn’t a noticeable difference.