Valuable Games

At this year’s Independent Game Conference – East, the Boston chapter of Games for Change ran a prototyping workshop with some 30 conference participants. The goal: brainstorm game concepts addressing one of the three issues targeted by our three participating nonprofits: Teach for America, Mercy Corps, and the Boston Foundation’s youth violence initiative. Participants generated a wide range of concepts ranging from learning puzzles to augmented reality and game design challenges. Just as interesting, goals ranged from educating players to fostering community to shaping real-world behaviors.

For our next act, Boston Games for Change will host a gamejam to move one or more of these basic concepts into a working prototype. In the meantime, we’ll be representing at the 6th Annual Games for Change Festival in New York, May 27-29. Register now!

Having so recently finished Fallout 3 (review coming soon!), I found myself contrasting images from today’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial with that same location in the virtual, post-apocalyptic Washington DC portrayed in Fallout. The game had generated some minor controversy when its marketers plastered the real Metro Center subway station with ads that included an image of a bombed-out Capitol Building. (Metro Center appears in the game as well).

Update: Here are contrasting images related to yesterday’s Inauguration:

The Fallout series satirizes the Cold War and in particular the aesthetics and politics of the 1950s, as seen through the lens of the Regan era (it was inspired by the 1988 title, Wasteland). And it’s cynical in a late Cold War, 99 Luftbalons kind of way, depicting both government and society as dysfunctional, greedy, and selfishly tribal. This was politics à la mode, but the hundreds of thousands gathered today around the Reflecting Pool attest to a new zeitgeist, one that makes the old cynicism seem out of place.

As I’m hacking out the outlines of a forthcoming chapter on games and morality, I’m looking at the full context of Newt Minow’s infamous “vast wasteland” speech about television. Given in 1961 while Minow was chairman of the FCC, the speech is, in fact, fairly optimistic about television’s potential as a medium. In it, Minow quotes Gov. LeRoy Collins, newly president of the National Association of Broadcasters:

Broadcasting to serve the public interest, must have a soul and a conscience, a burning desire to excel, as well as to sell; the urge to build the character, citizenship, and intellectual stature of people, as well as to expand the gross national product. …By no means do I imply that broadcasters disregard the public interest. …But a much better job can be done, and should be done.

It’s a remarkable speech in that its overall thesis — and even specific ideas — can largely be lifted out of television and into the world of video games:

You must provide a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives. It is not enough to cater to the nation’s whims; you must also serve the nation’s needs. And I would add this: that if some of you persist in a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator, you may very well lose your audience. Because, to paraphrase a great American who was recently my law partner, the people are wise, wiser than some of the broadcasters — and politicians — think.

Related to our recent discussion on positive game ratings and the need for better game reviews, here’s a new effort to publish a parents’ guide to video games: GameProFamily (reposted at Wired). The reviews spotlight the experience over content, and you’ll see in this overview of the Mario empire there’s some attempt to emphasize the “benefits” of games, e.g. dexterity (that old work horse) and learning to care for “fragile cargo.”

- Gene Koo

This was the mostly-serious question I put to our games group last night at our monthly meeting. The question emerged from previous discussions we’d had about how the meta-game-industry – critics, player feedback – influences game development. While the ESRB ratings are about as fuzzy as MPAA film ratings – and equally subject to manipulation – there’s no doubt that they influence actual design decisions. One former developer talked about how his team worked to keep a shooter at a “Teen” rating, which meant, for example, that players should not be able to manipulate dead bodies. (Shooting them while alive, of course, is perfectly fine!).

We struck on a range of possibilities: an ESRB-like rating system, better search categories in game databases, better game criticism, and of course self-critical game design. Although it opens the door to even more subjectivity, we were all interested in shifting the focus from a checklist of features (blood? gore? bad language?) to an evaluation of the gameplay experience. Whether the graphics feature blood or not, does the game encourage cooperation and mutual sacrifice?

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

…In light of something as moving and personal as Persepolis, the idea of playing a game that dealt with repression and revolution like Just Cause did made me recoil. My initial revulsion at the game’s shallowness came surging back even more intense than before. Disgusted, I asked myself why it seemed impossible to make a game that dealt with social upheaval the way Persepolis did…

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– Matthew Weise

But one of the stinging rules of rhetorical debate is that “silence is consent”. DesIn short, the gaming community conceded the argument that violent video games have been proven harmful to minors…

But there was a second loss in our silence. We accepted the framing that there is something dangerous here, and the only debate to be had is whether the industry is doing enough or if the government should do more. There was no discussion of social, cultural , or educational concerns with limiting access to games. By conceding that that studies have spoken, we ignored a discussion about why the results of all these conflicting studies might be more complicated than either side makes them out to be, and what role education, cultural and family discussion and media literacy play in how children participate in the world around them.

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- Josh Diaz