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Games for Change: Serious Fun

Published on July 21, 2006

As Director of Education & Outreach here at Arts Engine, I consider myself well-versed in what it means to make an impact with documentary film. The strength of the medium is its ability to generate genuine emotional responses from viewers, but in order to create tangible change, context is key; people need to be given the tools to transform a gut feeling into direct action, and it is the outreacher's charge to provide these tools. Without context, the viewer remains passive and the world stands still.

Peacemaker is a game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It seems then that the video game, with its combination of storytelling and interactivity, might be a medium tailor-made for social change. At once participatory and addictive, a good game demands engagement and action -- at least as long as the joystick is in the player's hand. But what happens when the computer/game system is powered down? The question that stands before the "Games for Change" movement is whether gamers can be motivated to go out and change the world when they are done playing.

This question was in fact at the heart of the discussions I observed and participated in at the third annual Games for Change Conference, a convening of several hundred nonprofits, game designers, foundations and academics June 27-28th at the Parsons New School for Design in New York City. And the answers were pretty diverse.

A number of games were discussed and demoed during the two-day conference. Some of the games such as mtvU's Darfur is Dying and UNICEF's Water Alert! attempt to raise awareness about important issues like the genocide in Darfur and lack of potable water in developing countries. In both these web-based games the player is dropped into a survival situation and needs to take action to save the lives of his family and neighbors.

As Susana Ruiz, creator of Darfur is Dying, explained in the panel Mixing Gravity with Entertainment, "The hope with this game is that players will be moved by the experience of playing and will then take action through links provided on the [game's] website."

Any of you who have done outreach for a documentary film should be very familiar with this model. It is one we rely heavily upon with our Media That Matters Film Festival: 1. Screen film, 2. Provide tools for action, 3. Track audience participation over time. This a good model, but evaluating the impact a film has made is really difficult, especially as time passes between when a film is screened and when an identifiable social change has actually happened.

The Community Organizing Toolkit trains players in the nuances of door-to-door canvassing.

What games have to offer that films as a medium generally do not, is interactivity. While playing a game you are perpetually "taking action" and in some games these actions can be an end in themselves.

Several of the games demonstrated at the conference could be characterized as training exercises. But unlike those developed by the U.S. military, which focus on first-person shooting, these training exercises take users through the ropes of nonviolent strategizing (A Force More Powerful), door-to-door canvassing (Community Organizing Toolkit) and even forging peace in the Middle East (Peacemaker).

The idea that a game could empower grassroots organizers or create peace between Israelis and Palestinians is pretty exciting, but whether or not they will be successful depends first and foremost on whether the games are fun, according to Raph Koster, Chief Creative Officer at Sony Online Entertainment and the conference's closing speaker.

Koster defines fun as the "feedback the brain gives us when learning," and underscored that any game for social change needs to be engaging if it's expected to inspire players to change their world. "Making games for change is kind of like making paper airplanes for change. It's like saying 'Kids these days seem to like paper airplanes. How can we use paper airplanes for social change?'"

Koster's point, as I understood it, is that social activists shouldn't just approach gaming as another tool in their campaign like mailing or doorknocking. If they want to use a game to further their cause then they need to understand what it is that makes games a unique form of entertainment and design a game that is first and foremost fun to play. This potential for fun is what makes games such a compelling option for progressives who often find it difficult to get people excited about causes as unsexy as safe drinking water in Africa.

Raph Koster, Chief Creative Officer at Sony Online Entertainment, explained that for games to make change they have to be fun.

Koster also explored the notion that games are inherently a construction that cannot fully represent the complexity of a real world problem. "Games are reductionist, mechanical. A game is like a mobile -- poke it and it jiggles." Therefore, when making a game about a particular issue, the designers need to decide what parts of reality they need to include in order for the game to lead to social change: "When someone learns how to beat a game, they learn how to beat it on its terms, based on the rules set up in the game's world. The way you define these rules will have a huge impact on whether the game has any relevance in the real world."

While the reductionist nature of games is problematic, it is perhaps also what makes them such a useful tool for solving global problems. "Social change is full of intractable problems," Koster explains. "But games are tractable. They look at a problem and break it up into little solvable bits. Games can show us that these huge problems can be tackled step by step. Maybe the strength of games is that they trivialize things."

This seems to me to also be a strength of documentary films, which enables them to mobilize audiences. A film is also reductionist through and through -- from what's shot and what's not to what's included in the edit and what's left on the cutting room floor. But this vetting allows a filmmaker to convey a clear story and vision of change that would be impossible to communicate otherwise.

And of course this article is reductionist, too. Only now will I explain that at Sony, Raph Koster spends very little time making "games for change." But the reason Koster's ideas are relevant and the reason he was invited to speak at the Games for Change Conference is because as a leader in the video game field he understands why people play and what games can and cannot do. He is also, according to the conference organizers, one of the few corporate game developers who seems to care about real world problems.

While Koster spends his days developing extremely popular games like Star Wars Galaxies for Sony, a small but growing movement of game designers are committed to making games that explore challenges here on planet earth. And they're just getting started.

Visit the Games for Change website.

Attend the Serious Games Summit this October in Washington, DC.

Read David Rejeski's argument for "Why We Need a Corporation for Public Gaming".

Check out more photos from the conference.