In Will Wright’s Spore, your task is to take a primordial life-form and evolve it to stand upright, form tribes, and ultimately traverse space. If this sounds complicated and ambitious, it’s because it is: Spore is a veritable five-course meal of a title – five “phases,” each built around a different game genre, all packed into one box. You start out in phase one helping a single microbe become the big fish in a little pond, and you wind up in phase four directing a civilization to conquer the world. The corresponding gameplay also progresses from arcade to shooter to strategy. Whether Wright is mapping the history of video games onto biological evolution or vice versa, in his universe life began when a seminal meteorite plunked into a receptive pond, and video games began with a coin dropping into Pac Man.
Category Archives: Archival
Torture in WoW
some interesting news coming out re: a torture-based quest in the new WoW expansion.
what does this imply about teaching (or being unable to teach) abstract values in a gaming world?
Will there be a desensitizing effect? I’m curious as to how we’d test for one.
An interesting idea – I don’t know enough about WoW to know if it is possible- would be to have a related quest be to save the prisoner and stop the torture.
Commentary here
http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2008/QBlog191108A.html
–Later update–
and here’s some follow-up from WIRED, arguing for what I think is a pretty good rough analogy with our “games to teach values” discussion from early last summer where we mused on using WoW to teach tolerance.
Our Fair City: using games to scaffold real-world interventions
Recently I’ve taken an interest in turning real world actions into gameplay, using MyBO as an example. While other games we’ve discussed have focused on “moral learning,” this class of games instead aims to shape or nudge behavior through game-like features.
Well, I’m now working on one such game that would support civic activism, particularly on location-based issues. It emerged out of a campaign to turn Boston into a “Fair Trade City” by convincing local stores and institutions to offer Fair Trade products like coffee, chocolate, and bananas. Because the campaign uses teams to build public support and to persuade stores, it seemed natural to frame the campaign as a game in which the rules scaffold valuable actions. For example, teams win points for identifying stores that already carry Fair Trade and for persuading new stores; however, it costs points to “claim” a store for persuasion, which they can also accumulate by signing on supporters. (Essentially, we want to model the idea of gathering up enough supporters to “attack”
Despite the fact that the software is only 40% complete, participants seem really motivated by it. We’re now seeking funding to launch the project, and would really appreciate any suggestions or feedback you might have on the concept. Our Knight Foundation application is publicly available for comment, and it can use your ideas. Or feel free to contact me directly. I’ll try to post more about the game design and how it intertwines with the real-world goals of the campaign.
U.S. military making big gaming research buy
Hi, everyone.
I come across these stories with some frequency, and Gene asked me to share them.
Enjoy!
–AH
“GRAFENWÖHR, Germany — The Army has created a video game unit and will invest $50 million over five years on games and gaming systems designed to prepare soldiers for combat.”
In July 2006, Hal Halpin founded the Entertainment Consumer Association, an advocacy group to champion consumer rights and issues. Since that time, the organization has done its part to give gamers a voice on a variety of issues and has gone out of its way to highlight — and with the help of its members — defeat unconstitutional state and federal anti-consumer legislation all over the United States.
Empathy for pixels
Intriguing quote in recent Escapist review of Multiwinia:
In some crucial ways, Multiwinia’s sound design establishes a stronger emotional connection with the on-screen carnage than some gory AAA first-person shooters. Perhaps simplicity breeds empathy, but in any case I felt more guilty sending mobs of rudimentary sprites into the teeth of rapid-fire gun turrets than I ever have realistically gibbing an opponent’s face with a flak cannon.
Are we supposed to feel empathy for casualties in FPS’s? And is sound design effective in Multiwinia because of novelty or because of something more primal than visuals?
Morality and “Gamer Guilt” in Fable 2
by David Nieborg (nieborg@uva.nl)
Does Fable 2 live up to its promises? That depends on the player. Those willing to play the game several times will find a well-designed, deeply engrossing, morally challenging game. Conversely, the casual gamer will see ‘just’ see a well-designed action game. The game’s biggest problem though, is its lack of immediate feedback. Every ingame action – being good, evil or anything in between – does lead to a reaction, but it is not always clear which reaction is the result of a particular decision made by the player.
Continue reading
Talk on Games, Morals, and Ethics
I gave a talk yesterday morning on video games, morals, and ethics in Doris Rusch’s class at MIT:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://blip.tv/play/AdrjUYHfVQ" width="640" height="510" wmode="transparent" /]
My.BarackObama.com as Augmented Reality Game
It featured minimal graphics, no sound effects, and deeply flawed gameplay. Yet one of the most important game titles of 2008 was played by thousands and helped change the face of American politics. I’m writing about My.BarackObama.com.
Game designer and scholar Ian Bogost considered it a washout election cycle for political games. McCain had his “Pork Invaders” arcade gimmick, and Obama bought ads in Xbox Live (largely an indulgence). But I would argue that 2008 represents a watershed moment for video games, a moment when the medium showed that it can, indeed, change the world. My.BarackObama.com (“MyBO”) didn’t just communicate ideas. It encouraged people to go and do something.
Continue reading
Ian Bogost on Games and Politics – liveblogging from Harvard KSG
Nicco Mele of Dean for America fame has been hosting a weekly study group on politics and the Internet; today he’s brought in Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech and Persuasive Games to talk about politics and video games. Ian has been ruminating on this topic a bit of late, most recently on Gamasutra, where he chronicles the “Birth and Death of the Election Game.”
Nicco’s relationship with Ian goes back to 2004, when Persuasive Games helped the Dean campaign design a video game to explain the Iowa Caucus.
Ian’s starting with his usual love for Animal Crossing. No need to repeat that here.
Relevant elements of games:
- Models capturing behaviors
- Roles simulating an experience, constrained by rules, leading to empathy
- Worlds that enable an immersion through imagined expertise
This allows games to give complex problems relevance in the context of our world. This is quite the opposite of usual politics and reductionist political rhetoric.
Politics as setting the rules for the roles that will play in a model of our future world that we’re in the process of constructing.
Continue reading
Budget games largely lack human engagement
Nancy Scola of TechPresident recently excoriated a budget calculator put out by NY Governor Patterson, primarily on the ground that it’s “more a dull-edged hatchet than a scalpel” and ignores revenue options. Strangely, though, she ignores the glaring fact that the tool is painfully meaningless to any normal taxpayer. Never mind how ugly it is (though that matters); its numbers are not only grossly general but also inhumanly abstract.
Scola also mentions the Obama-Biden tax calculator, which presents an interesting contrast. It, too, is a calculator — raw numbers stacked up — but it has the distinct engagement advantage of being about your money. Its designers don’t need to provide context or background; presumably, you know exactly what another $1,000 in your pocket would mean.
Such lame attempts at public education (or, as Scola argues, “pretend participation”) ignores the basic problem that for most taxpayers, issues of government taxes and spending are emotional, not rational, and not because we are innumerate but because such systems are too big and too remote for most of us to comprehend. This is a point that Prof. Henry Jenkins makes in his essay, “Complete Freedom of Movement,” which contrasts the play spaces of boys and girls. Whereas a game like Sim City allows players to mold physical territory, in girls’ games and stories like Harriet the Spy “the mapping of the space was only the first step in preparing the ground for a rich saga of life and death, joy and sorrow – the very elements that are totally lacking in most simulation games.”
Stated differently: cutting $10M from the state’s Department of Mental Health means something real for real human beings. The essence of a true public policy debate is to capture human reality in the discussion, not abstract it into numbers. (To those who argue that this would merely lead to an exploding debt, it’s up to deficit hawks to describe the issue as compelling drama, not formal logic).
A different contrast can be made with the Massachusetts Budget Calculator Game, Question 1 edition. As in the original version of this spreadsheet game, each top-level line item is explained with ample text — which requires players to be both numerate and literate. This “game” is no better than Patterson’s effort — except that the point isn’t really to balance the budget. The point is to show just how absurd repealing the budget is. It turns out that it’s pretty much impossible to eliminate the income tax without destroying practically all of the Massachusetts government, which an overwhelming majority of voters ultimately agreed was reckless. Rhetorically, then, the Globe’s budget game was less a simulation and more an exercise in futility, much like the message embedded in Ian Bogost’s “editorial games” for the New York Times.
But what about a game that actually helps the player understand a budget and make difficult tradeoffs? Possibly the best example out there is Budget Hero from American Public Media. (Read Ben Medler’s review). Among its stronger features is the ability to choose particular values that your budget should maximize (e.g. “national security” or “energy independence”). As your budget fulfills those values, the corresponding “badge” fills up. It’s a relatively elegant way to convey the idea that budgets aren’t just abstract numbers but expressions of our collective social values — moral and meaningful choices writ large. It also doesn’t hurt that the design is colorful, noisy, and generally attractive.
Most intriguingly, Budget Hero also compares your results with peers (assuming, as Medler points out, that the players are truthful). It’s a step in the right direction towards an engaged and informed public dialog.