Playing with Fire: Serious Hype, Serious Opportunities - Gonzalo Frasca
The reasons for this hype are multiple. One of the them lays in the so-called military-entertainment complex. The fact is that the military have been highly successful with their recent incursions on serious games. More importantly, since they have an obscene amount of money to burn, they have provided many of the resources that encouraged the emergence of the current serious games trend. But of course they have all the right to do this: they have been at the forefront of serious games thousands of years before the invention of the computer. Hype is also fueled by the entertainment games industry which has to defend themselves against the mostly unjust accusations of games being the source of all evil. If serious games were not good public relations, rest assured that the mainstream industry could not care less about them. Serious games also make good headlines. Actually, too good. They are quite similar to the promises that fill up my spam folder. “Play games and get smarter” sounds almost as tempting as “Make 150k while working from home”. Can videogames be the magic solution to all our educational needs? Of course not. Can they help us to improve the situation? Hell, yeah! More importantly, the serious game hype has been encouraged by players themselves who are passionate about video games. There is a long tradition of dismissing games as trivial time-wasters. We now have a new generation of players who know better. They are not afraid to view their personal and social problems as complex systems. They are not afraid of experimenting in virtual environments. They are not afraid of playing with fire. We may not be sure if games can change the world but I can assure you one thing: even if they cannot, we will all have a lot of fun finding that out.
Those are some of the core reasons behind all that hype. Still, do not let this to discourage you. Hype is also a tremendous opportunity is we ride it with responsibility. Serious games are not just software nor entertainment and they should be considered as such. As serious game developers, we have to set ourselves higher ethical standards. We need to be explicit about our games’ agendas, out of respect to players but also to ourselves. As I said, the AAA game industry sincerely does not care about us. Of course, this doesn't have to be like this: we could gather their attention by making really compelling games. We have one thing on our side: we get to mainly make games about humans dealing with topics that people deeply care about. With few exceptions, all that mainstream developers get are gnomes, space marines and cartoon characters. They can impress teenagers but we have the potential to impress adults. I said potential. It is up to us. Hype is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it exaggerates the relevance and power of serious games but on the other it provides us with a unique opportunity to reach a larger audience and prove that games can help people to grow in an alternative, more engaging way. Personally, I do not mind the hype as long as we have strong games and strong ideas to prove that video games can contribute to create a better, more diverse world. Games do have the power to make our lives better, to make us smarter, to let us learn in more compelling ways. I have no doubts about this. However, they are not a one-cures-all solution. Video games are worthless in schools without good teachers to support them and they need to be complemented with books, films and a good dose of talking and listening. Video games are never solutions: they are merely tools that can be used towards such solutions. So, we could milk the serious games cow, make some money and produce some half-baked games. Or we could instead use this unique chance to take our time and think about the long-term consequences of our actions. The video game learning/training/political revolution is inevitable as long as we set clear, realistic goals. Otherwise, our serious games will follow the tragic destiny of edutainment. We know what video game heaven looks like: it is the smile of a compelled player. We also know about the video game hell: it is the Nevada desert, where the legend says Atari buried thousands of its E.T. game cartridges. Guess what? There is plenty of more room in Nevada for great failures. We could fool the media, we could fool the government, we could fool our clients and we could even fool ourselves. But we cannot fool the players. If we really want to change the world with games, we’d better plan ahead, work hard and dismiss the hype. The Pong ball is in our court.
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