Serious Games

You could sum up my position as “games have potential not yet realized” and “part of that potential is allowing players to explore positive ways to work around problems.” This fits in to the concept of Serious Games, but I think that concept needs to be made more broad. Not all messages from author to player need to be about a Serious World Issue or an Important Educational Opportunity. Not everyone does, or needs to, think on those levels. I believe that games can teach players about sharing or compassion, and those would be just as much a Game For Change as a game about saving the rainforest.

ARGs as serious games

ARGs are better suited as serious games than most traditional console or PC games. While it is easy to make a game about “hit, punch, shoot” on a PC, it is actually very hard to allow a player to perform any of those actions in an ARG. With the exception of live events, most ARG players will never come in direct physical contact with characters in any way, shape or form. You cannot punch a character through the internet.

Players of ARGs are encouraged to explore and experiment. To send encouraging or hateful emails to characters, and see what the results are. Players’ actions within ARGs are, by necessity, at a distance and not of a violent sort. ARGs are therefore excellent teaching aids and can allow players to experiment in healthy, possibly life-changing ways.

I think that once ARG creators, and video game creators in general, recognize their position as artists instead of craftsmen they will begin to create games that challenge players. This challenge will not just be in a “this game is hard” sense, but it will challenge how a player thinks and interacts with their world.

Covert vs Overt

At least, the goal will be to challenge modes of thinking. I am reminded now about a quote from the author Kurt Vonnegut:

“When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high. “

I’m not calling for video game creators to be a laser beam focused in any direction. One of the big pitfalls of the move towards “Serious Games” is what I think of as “Too Serious Games.” Those games are the ones that come out of the starting gate (sometimes even on the packaging!), trumpets blaring and drums booming, pronouncing to the player that they are going to be Taught a Lesson.

Nothing turns off an audience faster than a proclamation like that.

Game creators must have a softer touch. You have to get off your soap box and allow players to play, to learn and experiment in the world you have created. You also have to allow them to disagree with you, at least a little. Remember: games are a conversation, even if the player never gets to talk directly to the game creator. If I’m a player, and I’m just being preached at, I’m going to tune you out. But if you allow me to experiment, to learn and see your point of view, I might be convinced to agree with you in the end.

In fact, I want to praise World Without Oil as a Serious Game done right. I see very little preaching going on, from game creator to player. In fact, it seems that the creators, for the most part, have stepped into the player’s shoes and are now part of a greater dialogue that is mostly created by the players. The players are allowed to think about the situation, the world without oil, and are allowed to come to their own conclusions. I think that a lot of people will change how they look at the world through this, and the change will come from within, not just from the game telling them they should. That’s my prediction, anyway.

My thoughts in a paragraph: Serious Games are a good thing and there should be more of them. Serious games should be big, but they should also be small. Serious games need to be a conversation, not a lecture… and they should be fun. As game designer Raph Koster says, “Fun is when my brain tells me I am learning.”

This month’s ARG Roundtable discussion topic (started by Brooke Thompson over at Giant Mice is “Serious Games.”

Some would say that games can’t teach players, that games are nothing more than entertainment. I do not agree with this statement. All games have the potential to change players, and more games should.

Potential

The general public has done its best to equate video games with smut of both the violence and sex varieties. Video game “defenders” have not done enough to redeem them, which is something I will touch on below. However, it seems sad to me that videogames even need defenders. We do not need people to defend the novel as an art form, or movies, or paintings. There isn’t even a need to defend “normal” games that have no art in them, such as football or chess. And yet we have a public and oft-times vicious debate about the merits of video games. Why is this?

Unfortunately, video games’ greatest strength is also their biggest potential weakness. Video games give a player agency in a constructed world. This agency allows a player to experiment, to act, to discover and explore. It allows a player to discover ways to help others, or to learn about environments that the player would normally never have a chance to visit. There is power in this. There is a difference between reading about a place in a book, and visiting the place virtually and being able to affect that “world” with your actions. On the same token, depending on the game and the developer, visiting this new place may also involve the player being able to affect this world in some very un-savory and violent ways.

The majority of game developers these days would rather make a game where the actions a player can take-the verbs of a game- only allow them to fight things in the world. ‘Hit,’ ‘punch,’ and ‘shoot’ are all verbs that are very familiar to video game players, partially because it is much easier to program those verbs than it is to create the more nuanced ways that people help and care for each other. Additionally, game creators still reside in a state where they view themselves more as craftsmen than artists, and the concept of authorial voice doesn’t occur to most.

“It’s just entertainment,” those people say. “It doesn’t mean anything.” The problem is that it does mean something.

Just entertainment

It drives me up a wall whenever I hear someone defend video games by saying, “It’s just a game. It doesn’t mean anything,” That defense implicitly agrees with the people who condemn video games for being smut by saying that they can’t possibly have meaning. It’s just a game! It has no message! In fact, it comes close to saying that it is not POSSIBLE for a video game to contain a message.

Nothing could be further from the truth. All video games have a creator. They do not grow on trees or spring fully formed from the earth. Just like books or movies, video games are a conversation between the creator and the audience. If a video game creator allows you to do something in a video game, they are giving the player permission to do it.

It’s fun to fight demons and it is fun to crash cars and pretend to work for the mafia. It is merely distressing that more game creators do not try to give players verbs that are alternatives to hit, punch, or shoot. I will talk about some games and their alternative approaches with my next article.