An intimate, one-track affair, the third annual Games For Change conference, which was hosted in New York City by Parsons The New School for Design on June 27th and 28th, exposed all visitors to a range of subjects – digital museum exhibits, art games for change, a history of the evolution of independent film, and television support infrastructure -- which might have gone unnoticed by many had they been at a larger conference.
Many of those involved in the conference expressed excitement at the match between Games for Change and the New School. New School president Bob Kerrey said he was pleased to see that the university, whose strengths in video game design and social criticism he praised, was able to support pioneering work in an assessment of games’ ethics.
Games for peace, games for justice
But whose ethics? What is “social change”? In one of the earlier panels, scholar/developer Ian Bogost and author Heather Chaplin pointed out that white supremacists and other hate groups currently developing games also sought changes to society – just not ones which anyone present in that room would agree with. There was some discussion as to whether Games for Change needed to be more open about the types of change it wanted to see. Chaplin said she felt radical right-wing groups were quicker to adopt games for their agenda than left-wing groups were for theirs.
The most prominent and ambitious games in the group aimed for nothing short of world peace and global justice. PeaceMaker (covered in a recent interview by Serious Games Source) has players brokering peace in the Middle East, negotiating issues amongst the interests of the Israeli and Palestinian people, the UN, world leaders, and other interested countries. Pax Warrior, more of a multimedia environment than a game, puts the player in command of the UN mission in Rwanda, asking them to think critically and make decisions to save Rwandan lives.
In addition, A Force More Powerful subverts the traditional demands of digital games, insisting the player solve problems in a repressive dictatorship through nonviolent strategies like organizing marches and publishing underground newspapers. (Not that violence is completely absent from the game; attract unwanted attention from the dictator’s forces and your side faces a firing squad.) Looking somewhat simplistic by comparison (despite its producers’ self-congratulatory presentations) was Darfur Is Dying, MTV’s Flash game in which players control a Sudanese child hiding from Janjaweed militias en route to getting water and returning it to a pixel-art village to distribute among farmers, builders, and a medical center.
Other games at the conference and its expo brought a broader range of topics to the table. Canadian developer LiveWires Design brought products to develop teenagers’ defenses against cybercrime and sexual predators – again apparently working more with multimedia tools than games. Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games brought Disaffected!, a game which puts the player in the shoes of a Kinko’s copy store worker and fosters an understanding of why these employees hate their jobs. Earthquake in Zipland, a game developed in part by social workers, aims at helping children cope with divorce.
Funding games for the common good
Like most efforts for the common good, games for change are not out to turn a profit. While some games for change developers are set to sell their products to educational institutions, organizers, or nonprofits, others seek free distribution to change minds. Strategizing for funding, as a result, was a major theme of the conference.
Dave Rejeski, president of the Serious Games Initiative, led off in his introductory notes, making his case again for a Corporation for Public Gaming. (His first call for this institution was published by Serious Games Source in April.)
He noted that government funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), on which his idea is based, arose from concerns about television’s impact on family meals and kids’ waning effort on homework and tendency to stay up later. The formation of CPB included a series of six books of research on television, covering social learning, adolescent aggressiveness, and other presumed effects of the medium. Many of the best-known public television shows, from Sesame Street to Masterpiece Theater -- not to mention radio shows like All Things Considered and This American Life – have been funded by CPB.
In light of the increasing attention to violence and sexual content in games by Congress, Rejeski’s comments seem timely. "By the time we decide we don't like the outcome” of a medium, he said, “the technologies are already there. It happened with television."
Rejeski said he believes funding for a corporation for public gaming must come from the government, despite objections from those who would rather not see the responsibility fall to them. He noted that even with ample funding from the Ford Foundation, public television “floundered” before government provided some structure. Additionally, he does not believe there is enough funding for the endeavor in the nonprofit sector.
Stokes noted that funders have begun to raise the question "How do we fund things which are evolving so quickly?" Data on gaming, as an emergent medium and social practice, is hard to pin down. But Stokes insisted it was urgent to answer this question. "The choice is not to wait and decide later," he said.
