Serious Games are Serious Business

If you're not yet familiar with the term "serious games," it refers to the idea of using games as business and communication tools (as opposed to simple playthings for the consumer market). Earlier this week, the 4th annual Games for Change festival was held to showcase a fledgling breed of serious game-- activist gaming, wherein nonprofits and indie game developers are putting heads together to create games to promote social causes.

I got involved in some SERIOUS BUSINESS too, and covered the event for Gamasutra. Check out my big-girl cover feature! I also interviewed the VP of Global Marketing for Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment business-- but couldn't find a place in the feature for the brow-raising quote he gave me that Forza 2 can "absolutely" train people to be racecar drivers. Nor would I include it even if I could; that's the last thing we need to feed the fire of the world's Jack Thompson Army.

The Cliff's Notes-- games totally can spread a message to millions of people, and motivate them to act in favor of a good cause, or against injustice. But in all of this grand, socially-conscious idealism, what's getting buried is the idea that these games still need to be good, well-made, solid and entertaining games. Nobody wants to play a grim sim for four hours to get "the message," and maybe the best way to educate people about something overtly dull-- say, gerrymandering-- isn't to get them to draw constitutional districts by hand. Most of the games I got to play at the festival were not yet at the point you'd call commercially viable-- still, games for something other than sheer play has a lot of revolutionary potential. Time now to stop discussing potential and to start making good, effective games!

One of them I did like was Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games' Airport Security, a funny little game designed to make the point that security restrictions in airports are arbitrary and pointless. It's fun, it's simple and it gets the idea across. It won the award of "Best Social Commentary/Art Game," too! But that's what I'd expect from Ian and Persuasive Games. One of the areas of concern with these activist games is that many of the people there are only casual gamers, or not particularly educated about the industry-- for example, almost all of the attendees (academics and nonprofit workers) with whom I spoke at the event had never heard of Gamasutra. Which would be fine, except these are people who want to make independent games.

So, we've got some work to do, but overall the festival was a fantastic experience, and it was enormously inspiring to see a panel of schoolkids' homemade educational machinima. I was in high school less than ten years ago, and such a thing wouldn't have even been possible so recently. Wow! The panel demonstrated not only how the kids were learning to use gaming tech to spread a message, but how they themselves learned a lot about various causes by creating the videos-- gaming educating people while they educate others. Win!