Raph Koster, in his closing keynote, voiced some tough criticisms of the field of games for change. The former Chief Creative Officer of Sony Online Entertainment quite bluntly said after his talk that he thinks most games for change “suck,” pointing out that many of them misunderstand how commercial games work. More crucially, they leave out elements of fun.
"Games for change, no offense, is just rediscovering propaganda,” he said. "Don't privilege games and think they are the thing which will help you reach the little kids... they're just another form of radio, television... comic books… cave painting, and so on."
This echoed something Games for Change co-founder Ben Stokes had said earlier. Stokes noted that developers needed to consider the scope of their projects in terms of other media. Aiming to make a social change game which literally “everyone would play,” he said, is unreasonable. “Just think how silly it would be for all documentary filmmakers to insist on being as popular as Schindler's List, yet a thriving industry exists around documentary film, and it will exist for games for change too. Our goal should be to have enough of the right people play.”
Koster exhorted the audience to explore more thoroughly what the strengths of the game medium are. The unique property games bring to the media field, he said, is their ability to model systems. To their credit, most of the games discussed on panels or shown at the expo were systems-based. Most of them are complex simulations, with interfaces which bring to mind the Civilization series or one or another of Will Wright’s Sim games.
Koster agrees with critics who say games are reductionist, that they oversimplify the issues they portray. “They're really bad at capturing the nuance of things,” he said. “They're reductionist, mechanistic… They push us into seeing the world in that way." But this reduction, he thought, is actually a cause for hope. He suggested games have the potential to present intractable problems – the Middle East peace process, refugee situations in Darfur, poverty in Haiti – in a simple enough way that players could see possibilities for incremental change.
But Koster insisted games for change advocates were ignoring another strength of the medium: fun. "If you take the fun out of it, throw it away," he told the audience. "It won't connect, people won't respond to that connection." Koster had earlier questioned whether play and fun were even possible when games were framed as something a player had to do, rather than choosing to do it. He wasn’t the only one saying this; speakers reporting from the team that designed MTV’s web-based game Darfur Is Dying noted that good messages in bad gameplay will not be heard.
Koster wondered whether games about such serious subjects as genocide and school shootings could ever be fun, but he suggested the audience consider framing fun in other ways. "I define fun as the feedback the game gives us when learning, especially learning patterns," he said, citing his book which developed a theory of fun. And he noted the joy in beating adversity. Even in Darfur, he said, "we can still reach for that win condition, that thrill of victory, that moment of fun."
And other speakers identified other things they thought games did especially well in fostering social change. Massively multiplayer games provide a lot of unexpected opportunities for building coalitions across class, ethnic, and national lines which are hidden from view in their virtual spaces, noted Douglas Thomas of the Annenberg Center at USC. He noted an incident in which he was playing with a number of French players who did not realize he was an American, but were displeased with the United States. When they found out his nationality after playing with him for a while, their reaction was "[Americans are] not that bad once you play with them."
Doug Nelson, one of the developers of the Doorknocker simulation, notes that games were an ideal medium to solve a major problem in training people to get out the vote. Namely, games provide private, “safe” spaces where those learning to organize can learn their strategies without the feelings of personal rejection that inevitably come from having doors slammed in their faces. Additionally, this game helps extend their effectiveness as organizers, as it can be used to help train at times when they do not have a free trainer to send out.
Speaking on the same panel, Professor David Williamson Shaffer agreed that games excelled as a way to put people in a different mindset, giving them access to the skills, knowledge, and values of that mindset which he calls an “epistemic frame.” “We have all this technology which enables kids to do things and makes them want to do things they've never done before,” he said, referring to games like the Sims which may engage kids for hours in chores like taking out the garbage which they might well refuse to do at home.
His group at the University of Wisconsin has used games’ strength in fostering mindsets to help teach kids about city planning in a simulation called Urban Science. Using the “epistemic frame” of a city planner, Urban Science makes room for kids not only to act to fix traffic problems in a city, but also to reflect on their actions. And reflection coupled with action, he says, is the hallmark of developing expert knowledge.
So is there hope for games for change? Koster said if there is, it’s not just going to come from better training for game developers working in nonprofits – just like getting an MFA in poetry is no guarantee you’ll be a good poet. He said those who want to change audiences through games should test their games many times over, returning to the drawing board when their game mechanics don’t prove to be effective. Or fun. “Do iterative design, and then go out there and get lambasted,” he advised.
