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Shoot Mexicans trying to cross the border, or guide Mexicans across the border. For every political stance, a video game. Are we what we play? If video games excite us cognitively and affectively, why not put that stimulus to use in the service of a cause—preferably a worthy one? Save the environment. Learn how to overthrow a government peacefully. Manage a disaster relief operation. Have fun while doing it.

Are video games effective tools for promoting social change? Can a good deed in virtuality make a difference in actuality? If so, how do we promote video games for social change, given that in reality the market for Halo eclipses the market for PeaceMaker? Do we need, as David Rejeski suggests, a Corporation for Public Gaming (similar to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) to promote educational and socially conscious games?

This year, FLEFF has again assembled a sample of “serious” games, video games that attempt to promote social change through education, critique, or simulation. The work ranges from simple maze games such as Homeless: It’s No Game, to more sophisticated strategy games such as Karma Tycoon, to a full-fledged simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to an alternate reality game (ARG) called World without Oil.

After playing these games, you will probably also find much to praise. That’s the easy part. Our hope is that FLEFF can not only feature these important works but also serve as a platform to advance the necessary and urgent critical inquiry that can help us to comprehend video games and their social roles in a more profound way. That’s the challenge.

Public discourse about games in recent years has successfully rehabilitated them from time wasters and violence inducers to (in the right cases) educational tools that provide a more rigorous cognitive workout than any other media experience. We are informed that playing video games is good for our hearts and minds. And if they probe topics such as world hunger (Food Force), the politics of nutrition (Fatworld), or the unsustainability of the fast-food industry (McDonald’s Video Game), they are assumed to be good for the world and politics at large.

This is the point at which critical inquiry must begin. Jesper Juul argues that to play a video game is to interact with real rules in an unreal (fictional) world. But if serious games focus on the real world—not an imagined one—what exactly are their rules simulating, if not the ways in which the real world works?

Congruent with all other forms of media, video games are machines of subjectification. They shape our identities by providing us with a framework for making sense of the world. Video games—serious or not so serious—are particularly effective machines of subjectification because they completely occupy our brains with a framework constituted by rules: rules to win the game. Video and computer games are indeed a cognitive workout, leaving little brainpower available for thinking outside these rules.

What makes serious games particularly interesting? Instead of disguising their epistemological framework behind an imagined world, they explicitly suggest that the logic we apply during play is the same logic we should mobilize for promoting social change.

In a game like the UN’s Stop Disasters, the solution to saving third world people involves the application of techniques such as needs assessment, risk management, resource allocation, and the maximizing of efficiency. The first-person shooter gives way to the first-person do-gooder, armed with weapons of mass management.

But where is the opportunity before, during, or after the game to critique the ideology behind the techniques applied to solve the puzzle of global misery? Or to be conscious of one’s own privileged position as a player and the accompanying compulsion to do good?

Alternate reality games (ARG) offer much more open frameworks. ARGs are games with different logical orders of rules. They differ significantly from traditional games. For example, chess has a delimited game space, pieces, and rules. But in contrast, ARGs operate with a more porous game space of collective make-believe, often marshalling a powerful social experience instead of pieces and rules.

World without Oil involved no game developers or software engineers programming the game rules. All that was required to launch the game was a problem in an alternate reality (in this case, a virtual oil crisis) to be presented to a network of players. The players then responded with their own blog posts, e-mails, videos, etc., creating a “what if” social space. World without Oil, then, was entirely a discursive, transmediated experience, as open as human expression itself. The goal, according to Sebastian Mary, was to facilitate “collaborative problem-solving to escape the boundaries of gaming and become a real-world way for distributed groups of people to address a problem they cannot fix by themselves.” By the standards of the people involved in the game, World without Oil was a success.

But we must now return to where we began. Can video games be used to advance a social cause? As you enter into the games in this exhibition, perhaps consider the following fields of inquiry as you play. If simulations capture everything but the risk, what lessons are we learning by experimenting with social change in the risk-free environments of serious games and alternate realities? Isn’t the ability to experience the consequences of our actions a fundamental part of an authentic learning experience? At a time when individualized consumerism sublimates the thrill of collectivity in virtually every interface, media form, and interaction, do serious games (often played in isolation, even if it is a networked isolation) further dilute our capacity for collective action in the world? Do serious games merely offer a new form of disenfranchisement from real political engagement? Or are serious games a serious step towards reframing collective action as attractive—and meaningful?

The September 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine (contents not online, unfortunately) has a piece titled Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games. It is a conversation between Jane Avrich (author and English teacher), Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You), Raph Koster (video-game designer, including Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies), Thomas De Zengotlta (author, teacher) and moderator Bill Wasik (senior editor of Harper’s).

The participants were asked to discuss how video games could be used to teach literacy. The guys (Jane is allowed to interject here and there) immediately get to the task, envisioning various kinds of possible games for this purpose, including a zombie game where you have to type a word correctly in order to off a Z. But the conversation does include more interesting nuggets. For instance, the group wonders about the changing definition of literacy, and what current technologies are doing to our literacy practices:

KOSTER: …To me, there’s a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they’re parasitic on things other people have written. It’s a democratized writing, a democratized literacy. (p.39)

Not sure I see the connection between democracy and literacy as appropriation. If anything, it reminds me of certain critiques of technology (such as Rivers’) which argue that our current technosocial systems stamp out individuality and are responsible for the erasure of the individual by the mass. One could argue that appropriation and annotation are the natural forms of a mass literacy, operationalized through the extreme individualism of the blogosphere (masses are not collectives as much as they are homogenous collections of isolated individuals). That resulting kind of democracy, therefore, is one which blocks authentic difference and makes the masses more susceptible to control. And speaking of control, the Harper’s group briefly touches upon the issue of authority:

WASIK: But you’re suggesting that increasingly it’s the social network itself, through reputation systems or what have you, that is acting as the authority?

JOHNSON: This is especially true in the online network games, too, which are really the most influential games in the world right now. Raph, actually, helped to create some of the biggest ones. With Ultima Online and other online games, we’ve had the rise of guild structures, these distributed systems for collaborating. A player who wants to slay a particular dragon will need to get twelve people together, and put one in charge of this, another in charge of at. (p. 37)

The kind of authority described here, however, is very simplistic. It is more interesting to explore the question of how in social media (and networked games) the masses are not susceptible to a central form of authority, but to a distributed form of control emanating from the mass itself, from what are considered to be ‘objective’ rules and values. It’s rationalism all over again, with logical thinking as the only valid method for interpreting the world. At one point, the Harper’s group confronts this problem:

ZENGOTITA: … But when the players go out into the real world, I think there’s a real danger—and I see signs of this in my students, and young people in general—of failing to understand not just the complexity of the real world but also its mystery. I’m using “mystery” as opposed to “problem” on purpose: problems have solutions, mysteries don’t. People are profoundly mysterious entities, I think, and understanding them in the real world involves understanding that you’re never going to entirely understand them.

…

KOSTER: To bring solely a gamist perspective to the world is a really big mistake. But of course this perspective predates video games. It harkens back to behaviorist psychology, and a variety of unsavory political movements as well.

ZENGOTITA: It’s systems-based thinking, model-based thinking. I can’t claim that Donald Rumsfeld or Robert McNamara were products of video-game education. But they show all the symptoms of it. (p. 35)

Zengotita sets up a dichotomy between problems that have solutions and mysteries that don’t, and points out how the gamist perspective inculcates problem-solving skills but not the skills required to live with the ambiguity of complex ‘mysteries.’ The thing with rationalism is that it inverts the problem-solution relation in such a way that only problems that have solutions it can handle are made relevant. Problems, in other words, are subordinated to solutions. This makes, ultimately, for a very impoverished relationship with reality. As DeLanda (2004) warns: “The crucial task is to avoid the subordination of problems to solutions brought about by the search for simple linear behaviour” (2004, p. 171).

Interestingly, while this threat was identified early in the Harper’s piece, the participants quickly move on to describe more ways in which games can teach literacy. It is as if we are required to surrender our agency in a technocracy, and while we can make observations, we are beyond questioning the progress of technology. So what if video-games produce more Rummi’s?

(Disclaimer: I own a Gameboy)

I’d love to hear from the literacy and gaming people what they think about the Harper’s piece or my reading of it.

References:

De Landa, M. (2002). Intensive science and virtual philosophy. London; New York: Continuum.

Creative Commons photo credit: gregoryperez