Playing with Fire: Serious Hype, Serious Opportunities - Gonzalo Frasca
I’d like to start by showing my cards. I do not plan to be objective here. Objectivity is a big word. Objectivity may work for cute games like Katamari Damacy or LocoRoco that almost everybody agrees that they are nice or innovative. But when it comes to serious games, objectivity is not only an illusion: it is actually a serious problem. Do you know how you can tell serious games apart from the rest? It is quite simple: these are the games that can lead to passionate disagreements. I am not talking here about plasma gun versus laser gun kind of disagreement. I am talking about perennial debates about education, gender, economics, race, politics or religion. Sometimes those topics will overcloud the serious game itself. Sometimes they just will be latent. But you can bet they are always going to be around. Because serious games are made with an agenda in mind. You may not be sure if a serious game will always reach its goals but you can be positive about one thing: somebody out there will disagree with it. So we should not waste our time trying to be objective about them.
Games as small laboratories where people can take risks and explore possible outcomes. Good games allow us to be into somebody else’s shoes. Great games allow us to see ourselves reflected on them. And essential games will never leave anybody satisfied because they burn with difficult issues that are too complex for simple answers. And this applies to both regular and “serious” games. Incidentally, the term “serious games” does not make much sense because it implies that the rest of the games are not serious and we all know that it is not the case. Still, as long as we keep in mind how inappropriate the term is, we should be fine. I would like then to start by stating the obvious. There is currently a tremendous hype about serious games. There has been a lot of media interest on the subject, fueled by the interest that it has gathered among the industry, the government and scholars. And I actually mean hype: serious games are enjoying an exaggerated, undeserved amount of attention. This does not mean that serious games are not useful -I firmly believe they are. This does not mean either that the serious games community is totally responsible for this hype: it takes two to dance the media tango.
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It’s such a thrill to write this first column. For the last five years I’ve been writing under the tyranny of blogs (first at Ludology.org and then also at Watercoolergames.org, the joint blog that we run with Ian Bogost.) Blogs are insatiable beasts and you must constantly feed them in order to keep them going. So I see this column as an opportunity to play in a different playground where I can take my time to try out each new toy with the time and care it deserves.
