As President Obama recognized in his Open Government Directive, transparency is only the first step towards a more vibrant democracy. The bigger problem has always been fostering widespread participation. After all, one of the most vexing problems facing today’s government – regulatory capture of an agency by special interests – flourishes despite, or perhaps even because of, the openness of the administrative state. The rulemaking process is open to the citizenry, but the public just doesn’t care – at least not to the degree of special interests.

The response from civic society is to proliferate an alphabet soup of special interest groups, from the AARP to the NRA. These organizations serve two vital functions: (1) developing expertise and (2) aggregating collective interest, primarily through membership dues (money) as a proxy.
We’ve reached the limits of this corporate, civil-society-as-special-interest, system. New, digitally networked communities suggest a more fluid and inclusive model of public participation. And, I argue, video games are worth studying for their ability to help us overcome the twin problems of expertise and collective action.

Games for crowdsourcing: Projects like Google Image Labeler illustrate how a well-designed game can harness collective intelligence to do productive work. The small amount of work you’re doing for Google is matched by an equally small motivational reward (a score and the fun of playing). While an interest in the project’s goals might lead you to the Image Labeler in the first place, continuing participation is driven by the game, not charity.

If public participation in, say, legislation or regulatory rulemaking faces a similar interest-aggression challenge, the solution might entail a good Web interface that draws on game design principles. Imagine, for example, Pork Invaders redone as a real-world game, with players poring over legislation to zap pork while preserving legitimate spending. (More on how games can also help define “legitimate spending” in a bit).
Perhaps a game-based front end can have enough mass appeal to aggregate across a broad population, which would be a change from the way we currently divide the public into narrowly-defined interests. This would require the platform be built and marketed to a general audience. I can easily see this falling into the purview of emerging journalism.

Games for values discernment: Special interest groups not only develop expertise, but also make judgments on behalf of their constituents. There are several reasons why citizens might delegate their power in this way – lack of expertise, lack of time (see above), but perhaps most of all a reluctance to make difficult decisions. Because the American lawmaking process is adversarial, with groups like the NRDC battling the coal lobby, we citizens often express policy preferences by picking our proxies. Lost in this system is our opportunity – perhaps our need – to weigh difficult decisions ourselves.

Polls are one way to gauge the will of “the people.” But, I think, a well-designed game can also surface citizens’ policy preference, perhaps in the same way that psychologists uncover our cognitive biases through various sleights-of-hand. I’m not suggesting that we trick citizens, but rather couch difficult policy questions in a way that our puny brains can comprehend. (Evolution has left us with a finely-tuned sense of face-to-face morality but not large-system morality; we tend to reach for big-picture comprehension through small-picture metaphors).

Imagine, then, a Kittenwar type of game in which players pick between two interests until a ranked-order list of priorities shakes out. Or, better yet, players distribute resources among different interests, and the game illustrates – in the compelling manner unique to video games – the results of funding a project at various levels. (Underfunding food stamps, for example, might show children becoming malnourished). Budget Hero provides a prototype of this kind of game, but it remains too abstract for players to really understand the consequences of choices. We need games that make policy accessible to the masses, not just fun for the wonks.

The amount of subjectivity inherently built into these games will make their design even more controversial than that of polls. (See this fascinating piece in the NYT Magazine on environmental decisionmaking). But I take for granted that there is no way to construct neutral questions, as the authors of Nudge point out. Confronting citizens with a pile of numbers and data merely biases their responses in a very different way – and arguably, not in one that highlights their core values. If we are to have true citizen participation that results in a more representative democracy, then we must be bold in rethinking the way we ask people to participate.

I have long felt that games are a natural vehicle not just for education (see Jim Gee and the Serious Games Initiative) or propaganda (see the Games for Change movement) but for stimulating moral development — not in some kind of proselytizing way, but by helping to develop serious moral reasoning and reflection. Most of this has happened through sophisticated story lines, not unlike good literature, but some of the most untapped potential lies in games’ inherent combination of player agency with what Eric Zimmerman calls “systems-thinking.”

I’ll flesh this idea out over the next few weeks, but for now I want to observe that climate change could well be the ideal subject for such work, and SimCity has been the darling of the games-in-education scholars. SimCity is inherently about systems and, like it nor not, inculcates a certain view of economics and urban development. (The versions I’ve played were decidedly Keynesian, where a winning strategy often entailed lowering taxes during recessions and raising them in the boom years). The question is whether the game works precisely because that inculcation is unconscious on the part of both player and developer, and focusing on conveying a certain view will break the magic circle. The whingers on the Gamespot post referenced earlier seem to think so.

(Interestingly, the comments are almost universally negative, leaning heavily towards climate change skeptics, with the environmentalists generally crying “greenwashing” at BP’s obvious PR move. I suppose that GameSpot readers’ first allegiance is to the game.)

CentsCity applies the engaging technology of online role-playing and social networking sites like the Sims and SecondLife to develop high school students’ financial and math skills. In a virtual city, colored by landmarks such as Penny Park and Six Cents Cafe, every user has a fictional persona with an occupation, investments, buddies to chat with, and quests that teach math and financial skills. This virtual experience makes learning more dynamic and breaks beyond classroom walls. The young people served by CentsCity will become adults with the financial savvy to build their own and others’ assets.

This reminds me of Wells Fargo’s various efforts at creating a financial literacy game, “Stagecoach Island,” in Second Life and ActiveWorlds. I admire Mr. Lloyd for what he’s pursuing and hope he’s got his head around how difficult it can be to create a game — or even harder in some ways, a virtual world — that is fun, compelling, and economically accurate. After all, one of the biggest problems in virtual worlds is rampant inflation and inability to control the economy (see the ActiveWorlds link for a description of how these problems plague Stagecoach Island). Then again, too much financial accuracy might just pull the rug out from under “fun.” Good luck to him and CentsCity!

Participating in the conference, I find that my own personal interest lies with either more sophisticated games that can convey nuance and complexity in a way that traditional media just continues to fumble, or games that are embedded in a social network and practice rather than simply put out there like so much advertising.

At our “Birds of a Feather” breakfast discussion on Tuesday morning, a number of interesting ideas emerged around the issue of how to translate games into actual social action. Coming at this from a community organizer’s perspective, I tend to believe that social change needs to be embedded in collective social action. The critical question become how to ensure that online activism translates into offline action — and how the game creators would know. (Many examples of successful online organizing involve actions that can be completed online — whether raising money or signing petitions or crashing servers or posting “illegal” content).

One very innovative idea was to turn the actions themselves into a game — for example, writing a letter to your senator gets 1 action point, getting a friend involve gets 2 action points, etc.

Another idea is to integrate games with existing social networks. With its open API and access to millions of students, Facebook is a natural setting to plop down a Game for Change. (Obama’s plugin just doesn’t get it — it’s a top-down message-repeater. What we really need is a way for Obama supporters to connect with each other and to get rewards for pulling more people in to take action).

Finally, there was significant interest in the institution known as Games for Change to take a leadership role in pushing the results agenda, whether by directing resources to the question, collecting and publishing best practices, or just keeping the heat on at conferences like this. Last year “transferability” was a major catchword; this year, not so much.

Games are one of the few media that give its users free choice, and sophisticated games embed those choices in systems that reflect the reality of our real world. For example, global climate change is not a single-variable model where more CO2 means more hurricanes. Curbing CO2 emissions also could lead to consequences for GDP of different nations, and a good G4C would acknowledge and lean into that difficult tradeoff. Does showing that tradeoff make for good propaganda? No. Persuasive media require simplicity of message. I’m more interested in games that help people see just how difficult moral decisions can be — and ask them to make those choices anyway.

See also Ian Bogost’s coverage: Day 1, Day 2

Zimmerman’s approach resonated with me: he identified “systems thinking” (which I recently found critical to modern legal practice) as a key affordance of games that most G4C developers are overlooking. He provoked the audience to aspire for better games with examples of genre-changing works (A People’s History of the United States, Maus). While he rejected my terminology in the Q&A session, I continue to see his appeal as for a level of sophisticated artistry in gaming. (When you use the Pulitzer prize-winning Maus as an example, it seems implied). To me this is not marginalizing but rather valorizing such efforts: at its best, art and literature call humanity to greater aspiration.

In answering his question (”Where are all the good games for change?”), Zimmerman points to Electrocity (which he prefers to pronounce to rhyme with “atrocity”) as a nascent example of what could be.

Thompson took the opposite tack by starting with “grassroots” (what some might consider “lowbrow”) games — games he compared with graffiti, raw responses to a raw world. Critiquing designers’ apparent preference for sim games — and specifically taking aim at SimCity for setting the bar for all G4C ever since — Thompson suggested that quick, dirty, to-the-gut games are what’s needed. Rather, he held up WTC Defender (can’t seem to find it, but here’s an article about its removal) as an ideal type of this genre. It’s a provocative point, but I don’t buy that WTC Defender is a game for change, nor that it’s a good model for the G4C movement to build off. It’s readable as a G4C only using Thompson’s interpretation: that, because the player is bound to lose eventually, it’s critiquing the notion that we can defend ourselves through military might. Perhaps that’s true if you can frame the game properly (Food Import Folly uses the manic quality of classic games to make a similar point), but even so the point is a relatively naive one.

In an age of increasing complexity, polarized debates such as those that would be engendered by games like WTC Defender can add fuel to the fire, generating more smoke to obscure the difficult issues we face. If existing games for change suck, it’s not because they are too earnest, but because they aren’t fun. Irony can take the sting out of poor execution, but irony provides only a single note at a time when social change demands an entire range. Yes, we need spoofs, satires, and parodies to discomfit the powerful, but we also need subtlety, complexity, and even earnestness to point the way to a new future.

G4C presentation: Where are all the good games for change?
G4C presentation: Grass Roots Gaming
G4C presentation: Zimmerman / Thompson Q&Q

This panel comprised the young people that many G4C developers want to reach: it was remarkable hearing from the youth themselves. The discussion focused heavily on using the game design process, rather than games themselves, as the program driver. To the extent that educational interventions work best with personal involvement, teaching, and mentoring, this all makes sense. I think the question for G4C is whether the games themselves can educate/change, and the degree to which they can do so in a scalable and low-cost way.

G4C panel : The Teen Scene (54:29, 51MB)

An interesting panel that, among other topics, played with the question of how games could get funded under different for-profit, not-for-profit, and non-profit models. I would have liked to have heard more about plugging G4C into existing commercial properties, or as Heather had suggested last year, subverting existing commercial games.

G4C panel : Market-Sector Impact (42:39, 40MB)

This panel focused almost exclusively on Second Life but didn’t touch what I felt to be the most important issue facing not just Games for Change but the entire realm of online activism: translating “awareness” into action. The mention of Camp Darfur brought to mind Ethan Zuckerman’s critique of Second Life from a year ago.

We tackled the question of achieving offline activism through online involvement at this morning’s breakfast. I’m trying to find a wiki or something where we can post notes from that discussion.

G4C panel : Virtual Activism (54:30, 51MB)

Keynote speech by Chris Melissinos, Chieg Gaming Officer at Sun Microsystems (June 11, 2007).

The game itself is relatively simple: the idea is to use your two food inspectors to inspect incoming shipments or to research the origins of food contamination. Each activity takes a certain amount of time. The purpose of inspecting a container is to interdict contaminated food:

If contaminated food slips through, researching the contamination can identify what food caused the contamination. This suggests that the next few batches of that same food are likely to also be contaminated.

There are five different types of food. Clearing each year (level) requires the player to deploy the two inspectors intelligently, inspecting different food types and then concentrating on contaminated food until they become safe again. (Then another food type will get contaminated). The strategy is very simple, and the pace of the game accelerates significantly at each year/level.

As a game “Food Import Folly” provides maybe 10-15 minutes of entertainment. It also, as its name suggests, offers a critique of the current funding and staffing of FDA inspection services. As the opening screen describes, the amount of food that the FDA inspects has gone from 2 to 9 million shipments since 1997 to today, yet the FDA’s budget remains essentially the same.

“Food Import Folly” is a great marriage of traditional and interactive advocacy media. My wish for the genre — besides expansion — is that they add more nuance and sophistication to the editorial pages. Nowadays, good editorial cartoons distill difficult issues and feelings into a pithy and “truthy” image. By contrast, the power of interactive media is to emphasize complexity, systems, and decision-making. FIF touches on strategic decision-making, but its core mechanic turns, ultimately, on twitch reflexes. Still, its madcap quality — not unlike Lucy’s chocolate factory — makes the point nicely. I’m eager to see what directions Persuasive Media will take its games in the coming months.

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