 | Games for Change Closing AddressDecember 2nd, 2006 |
The audio from the Games for Change conference back in June has been released. Lots of stuff here including Bob Kerrey and Steven Johnson.
There’s also my closing address (MP3, hosted there), of course. I’ll get around to transcribing it at some point, I suppose. But here’s a local streaming version:
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Lately I’ve done more talks just off of some notes, no slides or anything. This was one of those — loose and half-improvised. Here’s the notes I used:
Games 4 change
Mark Twain: Play Quotes
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Social change seems like something a body is obliged to do. Alabama cross. Body in Haiti, the maggots in the water. The fires on the hill in Lima. The dyslexic football player. Was my mother spending her life playing around? My aunts and uncles? My dad? But she was not obliged.
I say this because I want to challenge all you do gooding activists.
**
Perhaps the way to think of it is that games always change society, and society always changes games. Pinochle to Bridge to Sudoku. Monopoly’s roots in social concerns. The Anti-Monopoly saga becoming truth. GTA and $28m worth of change. And two subpoenas.Play teaches, shapes perceptions, is exercise. Play puts us in a mindset. I’m a dumpy guy, not a sports guy, but every four years I follow the cup solely because of indoctrination. Soccer is a game that powerfully shapes society because it is more democratic than most games
We have to question the way in which new literacies are crowding into or world, and the fact that games bring a new literacy, a systemic literacy with its own strengths and weaknesses. If we tackle social change, how much of it is about trying to bring this literacy to the well-worn issues?
The strong games for change will leverage this systemic mindset; let us not forget that all art is propaganda, though, and that models and simulations will have biases as well. Games for change is a form of rediscovering propaganda. Perhaps rhe real games for change will be those without agendas.
**
Fun exists where things do not matter. Social change matters, or should. Can games for change never be fun?
Trammeling sewage can be fun. Because we’re not knee deep in the crap. Losing a billion dollars can be fun because we do not see the ruined lives, the los of health insurance, the possessions piled in the driveway and sold off one by one to make something small possible, like a birthday gift for the one of the kids.
Some might say that unless we can convey that sort of thing, our games will remain frivolous play, stuff that distances itself from the real issues. Just a model.
I say that’s OK. One does not need to know the horror of something to believe that it is right to take action. One does not need to keenly feel the injustice in order to desire to right it. One can also be inspired by the ideals of something.
In the end, all games work towards creating new world views through the systems we model. They are all about changing, just like all media are for change. We should not treat games as the new medium that solves all problems. Media accrete, like technologies accrete. We still have cobblestones meant for horses on some of the streets outside. There are abandoned steam train tracks everywhere. “Dead media” like Radio, pamphleteering, and poetry change shape and re-emerge.
What we do, as with any other creative medium, is illuminate. Games can illuminate in new ways, but the old ways still stand.
Social change is full of intractable problems. Haiti is intractable. But games are by definition tractable. They teach you to chunk up, to chop apart, to disentangle. Perhaps this is where games can most change society: a way to look at the problems so that we no longer throw up our hands, so that people like my mother and my father are no longer seen as the exceptions.
If games trivialize, perhaps that’s the key lesson. That we have the money, we have the ideals, we have the knowhow. That what we most need is the will. Perhaps by realizing that racism is banal, that hunger is avoidable, the environment shareable, that a bit of distance will usually teach us that wars happen over trivialities. Today the Senate rejected the notion of a flag burning amendment by one vote. This is seen as important.
Somebody go make a flag-burning game so that we can trivialize it and direct attention to the real issues.
**
Are we at play when we work for social change? Or are we at work when we play for social change? Maybe social change just changes, and we the society change with it, and play and work march hand in hand through history. Mark Twain: Play Quotes
Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.
G4C is about changing the conditions. My parents work. Just let us not forget that what enables all this is the fun, the joy, the thrill of victory and the challenges we face.
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consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. Social change seems like something a body is obliged to do. Alabama cross. Body in Haiti, the maggots in the water. The fires on the hill … Original post: Games for Change Closing Address by at Google Blog Search: football play
I found SCMRPG to attempting to seriously engage with the subject – whether it actually accomplished doing so is a wholly separate subject. (Some argue that Van Sant’s film didn’t wholly accomplish it either, after all). I’ve said in the past that the issue with serious games may be that they trivialize — and that this may also be their great strength. Here we see that very issue front and center. Dismissing the game “on moral grounds” essentially argues that it is exploitative; yet we do not necessarily consider clearly issue-driven films or
[...] Original post by Raph [...]
[...] I found SCMRPG to attempting to seriously engage with the subject – whether it actually accomplished doing so is a wholly separate subject. (Some argue that Van Sant’s film didn’t wholly accomplish it either, after all). I’ve said in the past that the issue with serious games may be that they trivialize — and that this may also be their great strength. Here we see that very issue front and center. Dismissing the game “on moral grounds” essentially argues that it is exploitative; yet we do not necessarily consider clearly issue-driven films or books as exploitative. Rather, the sensitivity of the subject seems to be what is pushing the needle here. Can games, which some allege caused Columbine, then comment on Columbine without being regarded as exploitative? [...]
[...] — Games for Change, closing address [...]