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!

Non-Profit Organizations could be using games to communicate their mission fast, far, and wide. This workshop aims to demonstrate the potential of games to inform and motivate a wide audience. Attendees will work in small groups, directly with NPOs, to design mission-based games. Representatives from three local NPOs will be on hand to explain their missions and participate in the brainstorming. Attendees will choose one of the three missions as the theme for their design challenge, and work collaboratively over 45 minutes to design and share ideas. Game design experience is not necessary. Creativity is!

Register for IGDC now.
Use these discount codes:

• VIP: IGCEVIP09 10% OFF
• IGDA: IGDAIGCE09 10% OFF
• STUDENT: IGCE09EDU 50% OFF

Honda has loaded it with an array of gauges and displays intended to coach drivers to be more economical. For instance, the speedometer’s background color changes from blue to green as one’s driving becomes “more environmentally responsible.” Readouts reward the frugal driver with an “eco score”; if you excel, you win a digital trophy surrounded by a wreath.

The author and his colleagues all found that they beat the EPA measures, probably because of the electronic coaching. How’s that for a “game for change” that might actually really change the world? Just keep your eyes on the road and watch out for cyclists, Insight drivers!

But just as soon as the game begins, the protagonist contracts malaria. The player must then choose whether to work with one faction or the other, or with the local church, to get the medication he needs. Conditions in the country continue to deteriorate over the course of the game. The sniper rifle is still the most fun part of playing, and the moral questions of right and wrong are not exactly central, but they’re there.

The piece then skips on to the marquis Game for Change, Peacemaker, which is a shame because there’s a lot more that could have been said about the diversification of first-person shooters into areas of moral complexity.

Well, I’m now working on one such game that would support civic activism, particularly on location-based issues. It emerged out of a campaign to turn Boston into a “Fair Trade City” by convincing local stores and institutions to offer Fair Trade products like coffee, chocolate, and bananas. Because the campaign uses teams to build public support and to persuade stores, it seemed natural to frame the campaign as a game in which the rules scaffold valuable actions. For example, teams win points for identifying stores that already carry Fair Trade and for persuading new stores; however, it costs points to “claim” a store for persuasion, which they can also accumulate by signing on supporters. (Essentially, we want to model the idea of gathering up enough supporters to “attack”

Despite the fact that the software is only 40% complete, participants seem really motivated by it. We’re now seeking funding to launch the project, and would really appreciate any suggestions or feedback you might have on the concept. Our Knight Foundation application is publicly available for comment, and it can use your ideas. Or feel free to contact me directly. I’ll try to post more about the game design and how it intertwines with the real-world goals of the campaign.

Game designer and scholar Ian Bogost considered it a washout election cycle for political games. McCain had his “Pork Invaders” arcade gimmick, and Obama bought ads in Xbox Live (largely an indulgence). But I would argue that 2008 represents a watershed moment for video games, a moment when the medium showed that it can, indeed, change the world. My.BarackObama.com (“MyBO”) didn’t just communicate ideas. It encouraged people to go and do something.

MyBO awarded Obama supporters with points for taking real-world actions that would likely help the candidate win the primaries and the general election: making phone calls to voters, hosting gatherings, and donating money. MyBO wasn’t the first website to use game mechanics to stimulate real-world action. In 2004, ILoveBees sent thousands of players on a worldwide treasure hunt to promote the traditional console game Halo 2. In 2007, World Without Oil had participants imagine a world where oil prices become astronomical, then adjust their lifestyles in response. Over 18,000 people joined in, recording changes large and small that prefigured what people really did do in the actual oil shock of 2008. These Augmented (or Alternative) Reality Games all found ways to blend the virtual and real.

MyBO was the first serious ARG deployed by a political campaign. Sure, I’m stretching the term “augmented” a bit (unless you’re one of those who believed that all Obamabots lived in an alternate reality). And aren’t fundraising thermometers also a reality-based game where putting in $50 makes the mercury rise? I suppose – but what made MyBO revolutionary, and what puts it in the same category as World Without Oil, is that it also asked participants to engage in non-digital, non-virtual activity. You can donate money without leaving your bed or interacting with another human being. But calling voters requires an authentic human touch, even if the medium is digital (as it was for a colleague who Skyped voters on November 3 from Cairo, where she was at a conference).

Gameplay on MyBO was far from perfect. Part of the problem is that the boundary between digital and real remains only semi-permeable. For example, in January, my partner and I drove down to South Carolina and spent a week in the trenches, eventually helping to run a staging location in a bellwether precinct. For this – and for our subsequent work in MA, VT, and PA, we scored a big fat zero, because there was no way to let MyBO know what were doing. Meanwhile, others were apparently gaming the system by hosting bogus events or flipping through phone numbers without actually calling anyone, perhaps hoping to win various awards. (The site did limit the number of numbers it would give you within a specific period of time to limit this kind of abuse – or, I suppose, wholesale data-mining).

A typical quest (note the in-game manual):

Perhaps the biggest problem of MyBO as a game was its failure to scale. It was disheartening to log in and see that you were in 266,442nd place. True, the points and ranking were meaningless (except for the ten lucky phonebankers who got to meet Sen. Obama), as they are in any game, and I suppose you could argue that the fact that there were 266,441 other people doing more work than you also said something important about the campaign. But the system would have been far more motivating if your cohort group was more local: all Obama supporters in your state, city, or your MyBO groups. After all, the strength of the grassroots resides in its person-to-person connections.

The scoring system never did go local, but in early August 2008 the developers swapped out points in exchange for an Activity Tracker. Instead of winning absolute points, supporters “leveled up” the ranks from 1 to 10 (10 being highest). Groups as well as individuals also scored points, which helped people find others who were actually doing real work. Previously, it was hard to get a sense of how you compared to other volunteers: 266,442 sounds pretty low on the totem pole, but not if there are over a million registered users!

Some were upset by the change, which demonstrated that the points really did motivate some. Wrote one of the top 500: “GIVE ME MY POINTS BACK!!!! THEY DO NOT BELONG TO YOU!!!!!” – words not unlike an MMO player whose epic weapon has been nerfed. But for those lower on the scale – which would include all n00bs, the lifeblood of any campaign or MMO – the switch removed the sense of futility that pervaded the game before. (Points also decayed over time, which also gave n00bs a fighting chance. Consider it an estate tax for scores).

For most supporters, the points likely functioned as a curiosity. Still, the point system helped signal what kinds of activities really mattered, and it probably had something to do with the over 200,000 events hosted and 27,000 groups created on MyBO – an impressive number even after you discount some set of bogus ones put on to game the system. And then there’s two other scores to consider: 203 and 8,481,030, the margin of victory for Obama in the electoral college and the popular vote.

A resounding victory for President-Elect Obama. And, I suspect, for the future of reality games in political and civic campaigns. (Full disclosure: including one I’m now working on a civic engagement game for Fair Trade).

Nicco’s relationship with Ian goes back to 2004, when Persuasive Games helped the Dean campaign design a video game to explain the Iowa Caucus.

Ian’s starting with his usual love for Animal Crossing. No need to repeat that here.

Relevant elements of games:

1. Models capturing behaviors
2. Roles simulating an experience, constrained by rules, leading to empathy
3. Worlds that enable an immersion through imagined expertise

This allows games to give complex problems relevance in the context of our world. This is quite the opposite of usual politics and reductionist political rhetoric.

Politics as setting the rules for the roles that will play in a model of our future world that we’re in the process of constructing.

Nicco and Ian are now discussing “the SimCity problem” — that is, the model underlying SimCity takes a position on economic theory for which there is no competition.

Ian: people are obsessed about the lives of others. People call Ian, actually interested in playing the Coldstone Creamery training game. Why would anyone want to play a minimum-wage job? People have empathy and want to evoke it.

What about games and news consumption? Media consolidation makes this difficult; Ian’s relationship with, e.g., the Times, simply trailed off, probably because it didn’t fit anyone’s particular job there. Isn’t empathy the basic role of both games and news? News lacks synthetic information — understanding what decisions are important to them and why.

Video games as representing an opposite trend of many Internet technologies (simplification and faster cycles).

Initially, in the Times games, Ian saw these games as editorial commentary — topics with a complex system in them. (I think he is implying that he began to see an investigative purpose in time).

What about collaborative play, e.g. WoW raids? There are some problems that can only be solved through collective action. The idea of having a “proving ground” has some promise — experiences to play before real enactment.

Ian’s now discussing the point of his Gamasutra article, linked earlier, though his main focus is on what could have been possible if Obama spent 1/10 of his media budget on video games (and not in the ad buy sense, which he notes was mostly for “rhetorical purposes” — getting press on the ads, rather than the ads themselves).

In following up on that idea — is the problem with campaigning and its relationship to policy? What would happen if a campaign started with the premise of conveying complexity rather than simplicity?

There’s an attitude of the kinds of video game players that most people think are video game players have an attitude that games are a safe haven from real life. But this is changing. There’s huge self-censorship that goes in inside the industry, and these business practices perpetuate themselves. Contrast the 80s when the industry was more entrepreneurial. (Nicco mentions Bioshock). The industry’s attitude is hopeful inaction: as people grow up and demand new ones, they will magically appear… but the problem is that this isn’t true: you need to create supply, too.

Video games as a centrifying values issue, making it very cheap to decry video games. Ian mentions the ECA (Entertainment Consumers Association), and the idea of a union of video game players, or a common identity among gamers, “weirds” him out.

Gamer demographics — if there are political games, whom will they reach?: There’s a lot of bad data, but… see the Entertainment Software Association. The better question is to break them down by style/type. Ian’s own games — TSA game since 2006 has approached 50M plays. (< $10K to build).

An Obama game could really sell. Who wouldn’t buy an Obama game? Well…

WoW as a possible space to overcome polarization problems? (gk: ~ Bowling Alone argument)

So what about an abortion game that attempts to help each side understand the perspective of the other side of the debate? [gk: see the RedBlue project that publicconversations.org attempted to use to codify its procedure for difficult conversations -- it was never finished]

Nicco mentions that the Dean campaign’s game did inspire people to donate, get involved. Ian wonders if this idea will “peak” (novelty factor).

The problem is that the vast majority of these games are meaningless tripe. See Ian’s discussion of Pork Invaders, in the Gamasutra article, and also the contrast with Tax Invaders as a rhetorical device.

Ian on Spore: it takes an absolute position on the nature of life in the universe (that it’s most likely evolved from somewhere else).

What about the politics / political economies within each virtual world?

What’s the most interesting thing to strike Ian recently in video games? The ability of gamers to discuss what they like / don’t like about the games they play. The ability to take these systems apart and understand what makes them interesting is untapped. How come we can’t get them to do the same for their ordinary lives?

- Gene Koo