Games for Change Closing Address

This little talk was delivered as spoken word only, no slides, to wrap up the Games for Change conference held at the New School in NYC in June of 2006.

Audio recording

Transcript

 Introduction

Games for Change and the Parsons New School for Design present the 2006 Annual Conference on Games for Change. Learn more at www.gamesforchange.org.

We ask ourselves, as we’re working in this new area around games, what about those big players in the game industry? Could we get some of them here to talk? We’ve had some luck here and there, but frequently I go to people and they say “No way, sorry, they’re not really interested,” and often they’re right.

I remember a conversation I had with Heather Chaplin not too long ago. She’s been at this conference, and she’s the author of Smartbomb, this major book that’s talking about how the industry works, and she was talking about how in the industry there’s a frequent denial that games are political. It’s as if games were just fun, and nothing else. As if they weren’t embedded with ways of doing and thinking and being. And she said but there’s kind of an exception… there’s many exceptions here and there, they’re kind of infrequent, but one in particular I remember her mentioning to me. “Raph Koster. He’s a humanist,” she told me, and I thought, “Gosh, we should talk to this guy.”

But we thought no way, it’s not gonna happen, because Raph doesn’t just come from anywhere, he’s the Chief Creative Officer at Sony Online Entertainment, behind vital games such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. These are huge commercial successes. And we thought, no, not gonna happen.

But I was looking around on the web and we got this press alert. It came because Raph had put on his website, “I’m going to be out at the same time as the Games for Change Conference,” talking to someone about a story (I can’t tell you exactly the full details, but I think it’ll be coming out soon, right Raph?). Anyway, he was going to be here at the same time, and he was mentioning our conference, and we thought, “No way, he’s going to be here at the same time, we have to talk to him! Maybe he’ll say yes!”

So we thought, whatever, we’ll just give it a try, why not? We sent him an email this time and he said “Yes, I’m be glad to come and speak.”

So, we’re really honored to have him here, at the end of our conference, bringing us back to fun. Because that’s what it’s all about with games. As we bring these serious social issues in, it’s gotta stay true to the fun.

I’d like to just do a quick promo, I don’t know if Raph’s going to, he might be too polite to do this, but I’m going to show off his latest book, which he’s selling, which has both fantastic cartoons in it, and some amazing analysis. It’s been getting a lot of fantastic reviews and I recommend you all check it out. And now let’s give a warm welcome to Raph Koster.

[applause]

Hi.

[“Hi!”]

You all tired?

[Mutters from audience]

So you know, when they asked me to come speak, they said “what we need is something that’s, like, inspirational, to get everyone heading out of here all charged up, ready to go on and do more…” work for change, I guess.

And, uh, it’s kind of an interesting thing, because I know that games change lives all the time. I got, actually, a lot of people who mention the book, who go “You know, a theory of fun, isn’t that like…” The whole point was, those two words don’t go together. Games for change, maybe those two words don’t go together either, and it’s kind of an interesting topic.

I guess I come to this… not as a skeptic, but as somebody who wants perspective. Because this is a room full of passionate people, who want to work towards change, and are choosing games, which is what I do. It’s almost like if you were a paper airplane maker, and someone came up to you and said, “You know, paper airplanes, seems like all the kids are into that in the schools these days, so we really want to make paper airplanes about Darfur.”

[laughter]

Mark Twain said… I have it written here…

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Now, social change work seems like something a body is obliged to do. Which kind of leaves the play part out.

I want to tell you a few anecdotes from my life.

I did my MFA at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Famously run by The Machine, which was a political organization run by largely white fraternities and sororities that, after running the University of Alabama student government, would graduate into the state of Alabama state government. There’s plenty of press about this, you can go read about this, it’s actually quite a scary proposition.

To my great dismay, a black girl who was running for Student Government President had a cross burned on her lawn while I was there. Right in front of the sorority house. This was in 1994.

So that’s one story.

My mother recently retired from working for UNICEF, where she has been a project coordinator in a variety of countries including Peru, Chad, and Haiti. One day she was late back from work because the tonton macoute had assassinated somebody in the back of the building where she worked and they had to get the body away from the window before they brought in the kids to do their usual kid activity, whatever it was.

During my time in Haiti, I mostly stayed in a hotel, lounging by the pool, underage and drinking piña coladas, because there is no drinking age in Haiti and all of the high schools were closed. So it’s not like I could go do anything else. There was a guard with a machine gun at the gate of the hotel.

Hey, that’s life in the Caribbean sometimes.

When I was a kid growing up in Peru, another one of those places that my mother worked in, sometimes school would be closed because we had to stay home because of the strikes. There’d be national strikes, and you wouldn’t be able to really safely send kids out into the street. And at night, Lima’s ringed by hills, which normally you can’t see because Lima is this horrible gray haze, most of the time… normally you couldn’t see the hills. But during this time period, this was when Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, was in full force. We knew that the strikes would be coming because we’d see a giant hammer and sickle in flames on the hillside, and you’d know, now is not really the time to be going out. Might be a little bit dangerous.

And then, you know, a little closer to home, once I moved to Florida, once I was done with the whole traveling around all these different countries thing. Coming to Jacksonville Florida, my grades are completely screwed up because all these countries have completely different standards. They don’t lknow what classes to place me in. And I landed in this history class, and I look around… I had just come from Barbados.

In Barbados, if you were black, you were well off, and very very British, and you would go to the races wearing hats on Sunday, and you played cricket. And if you were white, you were probably a dropout surfer kid.

There I am in this classroom, and all the kids around me are black, and the teacher is asking a question, and nobody raises their hand. He asks another question, and nobody raises their hand. And he asks another one, and I finally raise my hand, and he pulled me aside and said “You’re in the wrong classroom.”

Of course, most of the kids were on, you know, a typical Southern state football team, and that was what high school was like for them.

So… a lot of people say games are trivial. A lot of people say that games can trivialize things. That they are reductionist. That they take issues like the ones I just described and turn them into toys. Something that you can gloss over. Something that you can fail to fully appreciate.

There was a part of Port-au-Prince in Haiti where the wells were too close to the basically non-existent sewage system, so the sewage would flow into the water. And the kids would not only bathe in and drink that water because they would also eat the stuff that came out of the water, because it was the only thing they had to eat.

Putting this in a game… How?

I mean, it begs the question. How? Why? Can you? Should you? Does a situation like that stand, in its horror, when you put it into a bunch of pixels or a deck of cards or something?

Now: work, play, pretty related. Games for change… I mean, was my mother spending her life playing around? My father works for a medical foundation trying to get remote medical telemonitoring of asthmatics and diabetics into the schools and homes, because people have to drive a few hours to get to the closest pediatric endocrinologist. Because you know, they only graduate about twenty of those a year. And the incidence of diabetes is rising like crazy, Type I diabetes among kids. You know, I have an uncle who is a fire chief, and a grandfather who was a fire chief before that. My aunts, they work with learning disabled kids. By saying “games for change” are we trivializing the kind of work they do?

They weren’t obliged to do it. Or were they?

Work, play, kind of a tricky line there.

Maybe the way to think about this, as I try to take a step back from, frankly, all the idealism and do-gooders in the room, is maybe games always change society. And society always changes games.

We look back a century or two and pinochle was all the range. I mean, you weren’t considered a civilized being if you didn’t know how to play pinochle! Anybody here know how to play pinochle?

[Heads shaking]

Yeah. How about bridge, we’re just moving forward a few years. A few more. Alright. I assume everyone here has now understood the rules of how to play Sudoku, so you are now culturally literate for the modern day.

[Chuckles]

We tend to forget, for example, that the original birth of Monopoly was in part a statement against the landlords that were oppressing some of the Quakers in the area around Philadelphia and Atlantic City. We certainly forget, unless you got to play this game around 1974, which I did because I came from a crazy liberal house – Anti-Monopoly, which ironically was caught up in a monopoly [actually, patent] lawsuit and ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court. Still for sale, by the way.

You know, games, and change, and society, they kind of go hand in hand. I actually saw my kids using hula hoops the other day. We don’t own one, but they had them at the school. So even old games, they don’t ever quite die, but we can measure out progress as a society by the games we’ve abandoned.

Today I met a guy who told me, “Marbles has rules?”

[laughter]

And change sometimes is measured in other ways, beyond jhust the cultural fads that might arise. Recently, Take Two had $28 million dollars worth of change hit them, as a result of Grand Theft Auto. That was what they just statated for their quarterly loss because of the incident I assume you’re all familiar with because it made every bit of news on the planet, the embedded hidden sex game hidden away inside the game. Yeah, $28m worth of change and two subpoenas, news just hit.

So play teaches. It shapes perspectives. We know that, right? It’s exercise for the brain. It allows us to approach problems and keep trying to solve them, when we have an opportunity to do so without failure just completely coming along and crushing us. Right?

Which is what so often happens with social change. You get your one opportunity to avert that famine. You don’t deliver the grain on time, and it rots on the docks, and oh well. You lose a life and you hit the reset button? Not quite.

It puts us in a mindset, play does. It puts us in our own little particular world.

How many of you are following the World Cup?

[hands raised]

More than did four years ago, which is interesting. Me, I’m a dumpy guy, as you can see. Not into the sports. I follow the World Cup, every four years. Because when I was kid, I lived in Peru, and Barbados, and Haiti. Because soccer is a very democratic game. It’s something that you can play with a ball and a couple of rocks. You can play it with a garage door. That’s your goal, and everybody just kicks the ball towards that.

In comparison peewee football is so clearly a game of the elites it’s not even funny. How much do those helmets cost? I have no idea.

So here we have a game that shapes societies (just not this one). Where all over the world kids play with a ball made of twine knotted together, and they use the opening in the sewage system to mark the goal, because they can just get another ball – it’s just twine, there’s plenty of that laying around!

So the games provide us with these literacies. My kids don’t understand why I follow soccer. They’re not literate in it. I can watch it and appreciate it, the beautiful game, the way Brazil passes and the way the US can’t complete a pass to save its life… I understand that and they don’t. Because of the perceptions that have been shaped. Games changed me, in that way. They gave me that. And it just happens that it’s a not a kind of change that my kids received.

The interesting things about those literacies – that’s really what we’re talking about – games are giving us these systemic literacies. They are giving us these understandings of how things fit together, because games are models, they’re simulations.

They are terrible at actually capturing the nuance of things. Games are reductionist, mechanistic, quantized mathematical abstractions. At their heart, they’re really kind of passionless. They’re like mobiles or something, that you poke and prod and they wiggle. You wiggle the joystick and you’re making Alexander Calder dance. That’s really what games are.

They push us into seeing the world in that way, in some ways, and maybe that trivializes things a little. Maybe it tells us hey, there are easy answers to Darfur! There are easy answers to the maggots that are crawling out of the well in Port-au-Prince.

And systemic thinking of that sort, that kind of trivializing of nuance, trivializing of complexity, the kind of thinking that gives us a SimCity where’s assumptions built in about how good or bad mass transit is, that leaves out the question of “Well, how the hell does this game even apply to Calcutta?”… you know, that can be a dangerous way to think. And we’ve got a lot of kids growing up learning how to think in this particular way.

So we shouldn’t forget in the end, though, that literacies pile atop literacies. Games are just yet another way to see the world. Games for change, no offense, is just rediscovering propaganda. It’s rediscovering the imposition of worldviews through a medium. Rediscovering a way to make us see things from a slightly different perspective. Rediscovering the age old core mechanic of art.

(I used the “art” word. I’m in trouble now!)

In that sense, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, Guernica is propaganda. Goya is propaganda. Everything is telling us how to think, one way or another. I’m doing it to you right now!

So it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as we remember that worldviews pile on one another, literacies pile on one another. Radio hasn’t gone away. We might mourn the passing of Prairie Home Companion, but all it did was adapt to a new niche and today we have Rush Limbaugh. We might not like that particular adaptation but it’s there. Old media don’t go away. Outside there’s still cobblestones for horses in the pavement of the street.

As a game guy, one of the things I would ask you is, “don’t privilege games and think that they are the great new thing that will allow you to reach all the little kids, and enable them to understand everything about how we need to change the world.” They’re just another form of radio, TV, newspapers, telegraph, telephone, cable, painting, and so on.

And let’s also think about what the strength of the games are, which is that they are models. It may be, and I challenge you to think about this, it may be that the real games for change won’t be the propagandistic ones. It may be the ones that try to build a model without biases, that’s don’t attempt to convey a message, that try to get us to see the world as it is. So that we can try to arrive at pragmatic solutions rather than ideological ones.

That’s something that games have a real potential to do: to show us things as they are. It’s something that a lot of media have tried, and not many have succeeded at.

In the book one of the things I say is that fun exists where things don’t matter. Play, fun, you know, it’s because there are no consequences. We don’t actually kill the kid when his marble skitters out of the circle. That’s the rule, by the way, for those of you don’t know.

[laughter]

And social change matters. So can games for social change ever be fun?

I think it’s a serious question, because Lord knows educational games have been trying for a while, and they suck at fun. Okay? Most of them are terrible at fun. But we keep making lots of math flash card games.

We can’t forget that the reason why games are such powerful tools is the fun. If you take the fun out of it, throw it away. It’s not going to be worthwhile and interesting anymore as the kind of social change tool that games can be, because it won’t connect. People respond to that connection, and if your intent is to hold a mirror up or just to propagandize, either way, it’s going to have to be fun.

It’s been shown: there are games about directing sewage. And it was fun, largely because we didn’t need to stand knee-deep in the crap. But it was fun. There are games where losing a billion dollars is fun. Because we don’t see ruined lives. We don’t see people who can’t afford healthcare. We don’t see people piling up their possessions in the driveway, unable to make ends meet or trying to get their kid to have braces.

Unless we can convey that kind of thing, some people – probably nobody in this room – some people are going to say that games will always be frivolous, they’re just going to distract us from the real issues, because they’re just a model, they’re never going to equal Darfur, they’re never going to equal Haiti, they’re never going to equal any of those situations.

I think it’s perfectly fine not to equal those situations. You don’t need to know the horror of something intimately to know that it needs to change. You don’t need to know, you don’t need to keenly feel, the injustice of something in order to believe that it is unjust.

So games may never actually manage to mimic, manage to completely represent (because of their abstractive nature) the situations that we face in social change work. And it may not matter. Because of their worldviews they create.

In the end, games are fundamentally about changing. They change us as we play them. They teach us and extend us. They bring us into new spaces where we can look at things in a different way, we understand them differently.

So they’re not one medium that solves everything. But they don’t need to have the emotional impact of Schindler’s List in order to make us understand issues of the Holocaust and racism and so on.

The old ways will stand. What we should do is bring the new strengths that games have, to this problem.

Social change is full of intractable problems. Haiti is an intractable problem. You know, I left there and went, probably the best thing that could be done to this country is pave it over. It is that far down in the hole. You know, you look at it and you go, “Uh, ah, um, er, I don’t know.”

Games are by definition tractable. They wouldn’t be fun if they weren’t tractable. They are something you can solve, there’s something you can address, something you can disentangle. Games teach you to look at a problem and pull it apart into little solvable bits.

That might be where games might have the greatest social change impact. If they teach us that some of these problems, that we look at and we throw our hands up at, are actually tractable. So that people like my mother are no longer seen as unusual. People who spend, you know, fifty years doing nothing but this with their life.

Maybe games can teach us that we can actually tackle these monstrous problems bit by bit. Take them apart, disassemble them, turn each one into something simple that we can tackle.

Maybe the strength of games is that they trivialize the problem. Because in the end, we have the money. Right? There’s piles of money in the world. We have the ideals. You’re all espousing them. We by and large have the knowhow.

The biggest thing social change work is mostly lacking is worldwide will.

Maybe by realizing that a problem like the racism inherent in that classroom in Jacksonville Florida in the late 80s is a banal kind of problem, that the hunger that we see in Port-au-Prince is an avoidable kind of problem, that the environment is actually shareable, that a little bit of distance usually teaches us that most wars are fought over trivialities – maybe that’s exactly the perspective that games can bring.

Today I saw the news that the Senate rejected the notion of a flag burning amendment by one vote.

To me that says that someone needs to go make a game about flag burning so that we can trivialize that issue into oblivion…

[Laughter and applause]

…And direct attention to the real issues.

I don’t know whether we are “at play” when we work for social change. I don’t know whether we are “at work” when we play for social change. Sometimes, frankly, I think that social change just… changes, and the games go on with it, and we play and we work, and history marches on, and we’re just carried through it.

Mark Twain also said,

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

Games for change is really about changing the conditions, just like my parents’ work was and is.

Just let’s not forget, as we get so earnest in conferences like this, as we put up our art and our struggles against The Man™, all in caps – let’s not forget that yeah, sneakingly, we have to admit it.

In part we do it for the fun. Because it is big problems, it is big challenges, it’s tough things to try to solve. And sometimes, even in the case of a Darfur or a Haiti, we can still reach for that win condition.

That little thrill of victory, that moment of fun.

That moment when we realize that even these huge problems are challenges that we can beat.

Thank you.

[applause, whistles]

Original notes

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.