Panel Discussion
Alex Quinn, Executive Director, Games for Change (
http://www.gamesforchange.org)
Ian Bogost, Assistant Professor, Georgia Tech University and CEO, Persuasive Games (
http://www.bogost.com)
Nick Fortugno, Co-founder and President, Rebel Monkey (
http://www.rebelmonkey.com/)
Tracy Fullerton, Associate Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinematics Arts and Director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab (
http://tracyfullerton.com)
Scott Traylor, CEO, 360Kid (
http://www.360kid.com)
This will be more of an informal conversation, instead of a presentation.
Question: How can games inform the public, engage the public, and influence those in power to affect public policy?
Nick Fortugno's comments:
The cost of life, a collaboration between HS leadership group, Microsoft was looking for metrics about the relationship between games and learning.
Trying to get a Haitian family to succeed. Replay when family dies. Bringing about an understanding of the economic realities of Haiti at that time. I wonder the relationship between that and the improvement of lives in Haiti, or US policy toward Haiti.
Ian Bogost: present the raw materials to help the player better understand a given policy issue. We have claims from candidates (policy positions) and if we enact them, the world will be different.
There needs to be a way to synthesize these incredibly complicated issue into a useful tool to facilitate understanding.
The games are almost like a journalistic effort.
Persuasive games has made games
Tracy Fullerton Comments:
We identified that participative democracy is the key. But I won't get into that now.
The effectiveness of understanding a policy, is directly related to the emotion reaction to the player.
Darfur is DyingHushScott Traylor: a Lot of what our business does is develop Pre-K - 16 educational games. They do Serious Games but it is not "what they do".
One game they created,
Budget Hero, was created to inform listeners of NPR and players of Budget Hero, to better understand policies during the current election cycle related to economics, specifically related to various issues. 3% of people leave feedback like "I'm a military contractor, and I kept playing all my military cards, but I found you can't win that way. In real life, if I was elected, I would not play those cards.
What biases are we bringing to the game as developers?
Is it fair to create a game that you can't win?
Moderator: A lot of the responses seem to come from the idea of informing.
Ian: I don't know if it would be possible to create a game that would get feedback to the policy makers. How a person votes is not that simple. It's a very complicated process. There are some games that are trying to get people to change some aspect of their lives.
One place we see this is in the alternate reality games.
World without Oil is an example of this. Alternate reality games give a peak at what might happen if... and having it play out in the real world. (This is a neat concept: where does the game end and the real world begin?)
Example from game: What would you do if oil was $100 a barrel...LOL
Scott and Ian: Little discussion about playing the game, and the ability to explore other opportunities. What people played doesn't necessarily reflect what their actual valuse are. Gaming the game.
Moderator: Are there any issues that lend themselves to this game exploration?
Nick: I don't like calling World without oil a game. For policy and how they interact with games is propaganda for a given perspective. We can imagine that someone creates a game that you are in the current budget situation. Do we bail out or don't we? What aspects. The playing out is done in a biased way.
Tax Invaders (Can't find a link) is a good example. yes I get the message, taxes are bad and they are invading. BUT it could probably be implemented in a more clever way.
Question: From a design stand point, how do you make the decisions as to how much you share your biases/information with the player?
Tracy: There are somethings in life that are systematized very easily, but others may not be so clear. How much weight do we give peoples influence?
Ian: If you think of a system as some sense of truth. You can create multiple systems in a game where at some point they intersect. It's not that one person is right, although it devolves to that sometimes.
We tried to make a game about abortion. One concrete design strategy, it was going to be about the issue space, NOT the issue. Create interactions that as you work your way through the space, you end up coming out of the space in a different place than where you started. I struggle with this. And I've failed miserably while trying to do this.
Question: Maybe we need policies about policy games. In order to have good policy games, you can't have an "endorsement' of EVERYTHING that the game says, otherwise you end up in the realm of propaganda.
Scott: We have to find out from people when they want a game if they are constructivist or behavioralist. This can really affect how things get put together
Nick: There is a game called NSDM. Its a role playing game where priorities are assigned to the roles. The game master then seeds the space with issues and events and lets people throw down the gauntlet. This is a good model to get around the propaganda issues.
Question: How would games address the undecided player?
Tracy: You need to differentiate from the undecided and the uninformed. The relationship of games to policy and representative democracy is no different than any other advocacy.
Games are not attractive to and do not speak to a large and broad population.
Scott: You can have the misinformed and active, but you can also have the informed and apathetic. There needs to be something empowering about the interactions.
Question: If you want someone to be angry, there needs to be something in their backyard that is making them angry. Otherwise they can not affect change. How do you create games a local public shere, where people can come and address things locally.
Nick: But then you have to ask, is there market there?
Closing comment:
Tracy: One of the things we keep coming back to, is the issue of representational democracy, but maybe even that needs to be evaluated.
Scott: Games are media, like books, movies, television, and we are trying to affect change in the same way that those media do.
