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ICED, serious game about immigration

May 2nd, 2008 (Visited 1417 times) Tags: serious games

Here’s an interesting serious game: you play an immigrant teen whose objective is to become a U.S. citizen. The opponents in the game? The system.

Breakthrough.tv | ICED

ICED puts you in the shoes of an immigrant to illustrate how unfair immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights. These laws affect all immigrants: legal residents, those fleeing persecution, students and undocumented people.

This aspect of the serious games movement — specifically, what I generically term games-as-propaganda, but Ian Bogost prefers to call persuasive games — seems to have started to boom a little bit.

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10 Responses to “ICED, serious game about immigration”

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Memristor - New Games and Education wrote on May 6th, 2008 at 3:34 pm:

[...] and worm its way into education in a new way every day. I recently saw an interesting post on a game developers blog about ICED, with discussion about the fine borderline between propaganda and education. ICED is about a youth [...]

Reader Comments

Patrick said on May 2nd, 2008 at 9:17 am:
Yeah, but when have games not been propaganda?
Raph said on May 2nd, 2008 at 9:59 am:

Fine, how about games-as-conscious-propaganda.
Ian Bogost said on May 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 am:
I wrote a pretty extensive review of this game. Some of the issues I brought up there can be applied more generally to games of this sort, including some of my own games.

About “propaganda,” this is a dire word. It has taken on a connotation of “lies” (much like rhetoric), but once meant something much more general, more like information in support of a particular position. Raph knows the difference, but it’s unfortunate that some see any kind of work with an opinion as a Bad Thing.
Raph said on May 2nd, 2008 at 11:13 am:

I am definitely using the word in the classic sense, not the negative sense.
Michael Chui said on May 2nd, 2008 at 11:23 am:
There’s a gerrymandering game that I found oddly enjoyable at G4C 2007. I can’t recall the name of it. I also liked Karma Tycoon, even if I sucked at it. I don’t remember whether or not it was any good as propaganda, though.
Ian Bogost said on May 2nd, 2008 at 12:55 pm:
@Raph
Yup yup.

@Michael
It’s the Redistricting Game.
David McD said on May 4th, 2008 at 5:32 pm:
There’s also a strong review by Greg Costikyan on PlayThisThing. I played it after reading his remarks, and I agree with his analysis. I’m in the process of developing a serious game of my own, and I find works like this to be both inspiring and sobering.
Greg said on May 4th, 2008 at 5:43 pm:
Might be nice if it didn’t suck, though — my review.
Prokofy Neva said on May 12th, 2008 at 10:25 pm:
Raph, you need to use it in the negative sense, too, when it comes to this game referenced and games like Bogost’s games. Serious games *are* propaganda. I’ve never seen one, especially on the Serious Games list, that *wasn’t* propaganda, and that’s why a lot of them *are not fun*.

They start from a worldview and a bias, usually on the “left” or “progressive” side, and they spring fullblown from there, articulating all those memes and prejudices to try to shovel them at people, especially unformed and vulnerable children. That’s naturally repugnant. All their efforts to come up with the token “hate on Iran” or “Rapture” type of game on “the other side” as a counterweight look absolutely lame, given the overwhelming presence of “games for change” made by liberals and progressives, even in government (especially in government, as they are Clintonites in the wilderness, a lot of them).

I *have* come to see any kind of game agitprop as lying and bad precisely because often, in its “persuasiveness” it brooks no dissent nor admits any ambiguity, and I also see how thin-skinned the defenders are (paging Richard Bartle). Those “using rhetoric to persuade” aren’t interested in all in any kind of debate and enlightenment on a set of issues, they merely want to propagandize their viewpoint which they believe ardently to be “the truth”. At least when I do that, I say I’m doing that, I don’t claim to impose it as a system (remember, we’ve been through all that, please) — and I’m not trying to spread myself in the schools or institutionalize myself. See the difference? This gameprop is pretty repugnant precisely when you can see ample information that *it isn’t* the truth.

It would be one thing if these games were more neutrally helping people to think through complex issues, and to see the plusses and minuses of an issue like immigration; after all, despite all these evils referenced here in the immigration system, lots and lots of people keep coming, keep staying, and not all of them have these awful experiences — although of course they are present in the system and documented well.

But they don’t. You are supposed to emerge “persuaded”. Ugh. Overturn these money-changing tables in the Temple of Gaming, please.

BTW, waiting for somebody besides me to notice the irony of Jane “Fix Reality” McGonigal speaking at the tony $2000 New Yorker conference, she of the World Without Oil PC game, being sponsored by the government of *Dubai* of all things. I guess it’s about selling the rope.

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