Persuasive Games: Games Phone Home - Ian Bogost
Later in the game, the player returns to the Forbidden Fortress, much more powerful and experienced than before. And it is here that Wind Waker differs from Darfur: weakness-enforced stealth in Wind Waker serves only to accentuate the player’s future growth in power: enemies that previously overwhelmed the player are easily defeated. In Darfur, weakness is all the player ever gets. There is no magic to invoke, no heroic lineage to appeal to; strength adequate to survive is simply inaccessible. I have numerous objections to the way Darfur is Dying represents the current political situation in the Sudan, most of which relate to how the game (and really, most American media rhetoric about the region) ignores the historical and political context for the current violence. But the game’s water foraging dynamic offers an important lesson for designers of serious games. If such games are meant, at least in part, to foster empathy for terrible real-world situations in which the players fortunate enough to play video games might intervene, then those games would do well to invite us to step into the smaller, more uncomfortable shoes of the downtrodden rather than the larger, more well-heeled shoes of the powerful.
I’ve attempted to implement such a strategy in some of my own games, albeit in the service of less geopolitically charged topics than sub-Saharan African politics. For example, in Disaffected!, a parody of the Kinko’s copy store, the player is stripped of the power to service customers successfully (a feature common to order-fulfillment games from Tapper to Diner Dash). Instead, he is forced to perform under the powerlessness of alienated labor. Darfur is Dying and Disaffected! notwithstanding, proceduralized weakness is not new to serious games. Many players might think first of Ico, a game in which the player takes responsibility for an almost helpless companion. But I would trace the dynamic back much farther, to one of the most maligned titles in video game history: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari VCS (2600).
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Among contemporary commercial video games, the closest comparison to the rhetoric of weakness in Darfur is Dying could perhaps be found in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. In the opening stages of Wind Waker, the player’s character travels to The Forbideen Fortress to confront his sister’s kidnapper. But, since he is too weak to combat the enemies he faces there, the player must instead hide in dark corners and inside barrels to pass unnoticed.
