Games for Change Closing Address
The audio from the Games for Change conference back in June has been released. Lots of stuff here including Bob Kerrey and Steven Johnson.
There’s also my closing address (MP3, hosted there), of course. I’ll get around to transcribing it at some point, I suppose. But here’s a local streaming version:
Lately I’ve done more talks just off of some notes, no slides or anything. This was one of those — loose and half-improvised. Here’s the notes I used:
Games 4 change
Mark Twain: Play Quotes
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Social change seems like something a body is obliged to do. Alabama cross. Body in Haiti, the maggots in the water. The fires on the hill in Lima. The dyslexic football player. Was my mother spending her life playing around? My aunts and uncles? My dad? But she was not obliged.
I say this because I want to challenge all you do gooding activists.
**
Perhaps the way to think of it is that games always change society, and society always changes games. Pinochle to Bridge to Sudoku. Monopoly’s roots in social concerns. The Anti-Monopoly saga becoming truth. GTA and $28m worth of change. And two subpoenas.Play teaches, shapes perceptions, is exercise. Play puts us in a mindset. I’m a dumpy guy, not a sports guy, but every four years I follow the cup solely because of indoctrination. Soccer is a game that powerfully shapes society because it is more democratic than most games
We have to question the way in which new literacies are crowding into or world, and the fact that games bring a new literacy, a systemic literacy with its own strengths and weaknesses. If we tackle social change, how much of it is about trying to bring this literacy to the well-worn issues?
The strong games for change will leverage this systemic mindset; let us not forget that all art is propaganda, though, and that models and simulations will have biases as well. Games for change is a form of rediscovering propaganda. Perhaps rhe real games for change will be those without agendas.
**
Fun exists where things do not matter. Social change matters, or should. Can games for change never be fun?
Trammeling sewage can be fun. Because we’re not knee deep in the crap. Losing a billion dollars can be fun because we do not see the ruined lives, the los of health insurance, the possessions piled in the driveway and sold off one by one to make something small possible, like a birthday gift for the one of the kids.
Some might say that unless we can convey that sort of thing, our games will remain frivolous play, stuff that distances itself from the real issues. Just a model.
I say that’s OK. One does not need to know the horror of something to believe that it is right to take action. One does not need to keenly feel the injustice in order to desire to right it. One can also be inspired by the ideals of something.
In the end, all games work towards creating new world views through the systems we model. They are all about changing, just like all media are for change. We should not treat games as the new medium that solves all problems. Media accrete, like technologies accrete. We still have cobblestones meant for horses on some of the streets outside. There are abandoned steam train tracks everywhere. “Dead media” like Radio, pamphleteering, and poetry change shape and re-emerge.
What we do, as with any other creative medium, is illuminate. Games can illuminate in new ways, but the old ways still stand.
Social change is full of intractable problems. Haiti is intractable. But games are by definition tractable. They teach you to chunk up, to chop apart, to disentangle. Perhaps this is where games can most change society: a way to look at the problems so that we no longer throw up our hands, so that people like my mother and my father are no longer seen as the exceptions.
If games trivialize, perhaps that’s the key lesson. That we have the money, we have the ideals, we have the knowhow. That what we most need is the will. Perhaps by realizing that racism is banal, that hunger is avoidable, the environment shareable, that a bit of distance will usually teach us that wars happen over trivialities. Today the Senate rejected the notion of a flag burning amendment by one vote. This is seen as important.
Somebody go make a flag-burning game so that we can trivialize it and direct attention to the real issues.
**
Are we at play when we work for social change? Or are we at work when we play for social change? Maybe social change just changes, and we the society change with it, and play and work march hand in hand through history. Mark Twain: Play Quotes
Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.
G4C is about changing the conditions. My parents work. Just let us not forget that what enables all this is the fun, the joy, the thrill of victory and the challenges we face.
6 Responses to “Games for Change Closing Address”
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consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. Social change seems like something a body is obliged to do. Alabama cross. Body in Haiti, the maggots in the water. The fires on the hill … Original post: Games for Change Closing Address by at Google Blog Search: football play
I found SCMRPG to attempting to seriously engage with the subject – whether it actually accomplished doing so is a wholly separate subject. (Some argue that Van Sant’s film didn’t wholly accomplish it either, after all). I’ve said in the past that the issue with serious games may be that they trivialize — and that this may also be their great strength. Here we see that very issue front and center. Dismissing the game “on moral grounds” essentially argues that it is exploitative; yet we do not necessarily consider clearly issue-driven films or
Very interesting. Thanks. My random responses:
My main interest in game development is designing a didactic game through interactive allegory.
Allegory is a very tricky business. A difficult balance must be struck with the force and obviousness of the communication’s impression. It’s also difficult controlling the universality vs contextuality of the message. As you pointed out, Monopoly was once recognized as a statement on economic ethics, whereas now it’s just another fun game to most players. Conversely, with what idea did the poker variant “Mexican sweat” gets its name, and do many players make a connection between the label and its gameplay? (symbolism and allegory don’t always put forth positive messages)
A primary means of making a game didactic is sanctions. I think modern Americans in general, and perhaps most individuals of Western cultures, generally view any moral instruction from non-family as arrogant and unwarranted, but we do accept relatively-overt didactic sanctioning in some games while still perceiving those games as fun. In American football, a game which is appealing largely for its celebration of controlled violence (i say as a fan), there are in-game penalties for excessive celebration, unnecessary roughness, and tackles which endanger another player’s well-being. In every sport I played on a team growing up (and I played them all), the players of the opposing teams were required to shake hands afterwards and forcibly dissuaded from taunting other players. Yet we still had fun.
We call them “games”, which seems to apply the ultimately goal should be “fun”, but the word “appealing” is better. “Deep” stories and “deep” works of art are not fun, or not only fun…or even “entertaining” in the most common usage of the word. They are appealing; they attract us to them. The game developer doesn’t need to make the player smile, or tense with joy or anticipation; but instead just needs to make the player want to continue the game, and maybe even come back to it when it’s over (if it ends).
Work and play aren’t exactly exclusive of one another. I’m a Catholic. Did you know that a major consideration in the Church’s recognition of someone as a saint is that the person was joyful? A saint is illuminated from within during acts of service. Mother Theresa was famous among world newspapers for suffering to care for the suffering, but she was famous among those who met her directly as a lady who was always smiling and often joking while she tended to the sick and the hungry. Joy and work…joy and suffering even…are not mutually exclusive.
“Can you? Should you?” show the horrors of reality in complete honesty? The cultural majorities of the West (of all ends of the political spectrum) are against the idea. Even in media aimed at adults, the general consensus seems to be that utter truth is too much. I disagree. I’m of Flannery O’Connor’s bent in thinking “for the blind, you draw large and startling images, and for the hard of hearing, you shout”. And besides that, truth is good, even when it’s most painful…people just need a guiding hand there for support. But even if I were at liberty to design a completely honest game, what are the odds I could get it published? I’ll tell you this though…regardless of said hesitation, many people respond positively to the naked truth when it’s offered to them at last.
Human beings long for truth. It’s why so many Normandy veterans went to relive the horrors of war in the movie theater with “Saving Private Ryan”, despite remembering only too well that those memories would be more comfortably forgotten.
So… How best may we reveal truth and encourage action through video games? To that, I’ll just offer two brief thoughts:
Socrates offered wisdom by asking for it. Christ spoke in parables, because statements are take-it-or-leave-it (more passively accepted or rejected) and statements don’t grow with experience the same way. The strength of games is real-time feedback to player choices. You can let the players make their own choices, but sanction them accordingly; and remember that sanctions can be broad in scope.
For example: In an RPG, a young beggar girl asks for something to eat. The player can be generous with food, generous with money, generous with service (guiding the girl to aid) or ignore her entirely. If the player is generous, maybe the girl just smiles and thanks the player; maybe she joyfully greets and thanks the player everytime the player is in town; maybe she is re-encountered in better living circumstances (she’s not only healthily fed, but is attending school too). But what if the player ignored her, and later encountered the young girl’s dead body emaciated (from hunger) at the edge of an alley? What if the town left the body there for days or even weeks, rotting and picked at by vermin, because nobody cares about beggars? Graphic and horrific, certainly. Fun? No, but appealing in the same way that “Schindler’s List” appealed to millions and received an Oscar award? It’s an appeal to the human longing for truth, and for justice (people need inspiration).
And lastly.. What does the game developer sacrifice? Great service (in the moral, not the economic, sense) is the reward of great sacrifice. What can we offer of ourselves? Can we be open, revealing our deepest frailties, so that others may not feel alone in inner darkness? Can we be strong, accepting years of criticism and headaches (political, financial, personal) for stubborn committment to truth, instead of security? I don’t mean to poeticize the concept, but I really don’t believe game developers can make great changes for good without sacrifices of some sort.
[…] Original post by Raph […]
[…] I found SCMRPG to attempting to seriously engage with the subject – whether it actually accomplished doing so is a wholly separate subject. (Some argue that Van Sant’s film didn’t wholly accomplish it either, after all). I’ve said in the past that the issue with serious games may be that they trivialize — and that this may also be their great strength. Here we see that very issue front and center. Dismissing the game “on moral grounds” essentially argues that it is exploitative; yet we do not necessarily consider clearly issue-driven films or books as exploitative. Rather, the sensitivity of the subject seems to be what is pushing the needle here. Can games, which some allege caused Columbine, then comment on Columbine without being regarded as exploitative? […]
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