The video games most of us are familiar with are typically designed with the sole purpose of entertaining. With rare exceptions, such as the recent Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which delivers a commentary on privately funded militaries and the consequences of war-based economies, the vast majority of commercial games amuse without distilling any useful insights about us, our culture, or the world in general.

However, there is a growing movement of so-called “serious games” that have as their aim the dissemination of political ideas. Usually free, these PC-based titles are made by activists, charitable organizations, lobby groups, governments, and individuals interested in distributing important concepts and information across the Internet by novel means. The diversity of serious games is impressive.

Real Lives (www.educationalsimulations.com) allows players to simulate a life from birth to death in one of 190 countries around the world. As your character ages, he or she will endure issues relevant to his or her region. Someone growing up in Burma, for example, might contract hookworms, be drafted into the military, or forced to work a menial job, whereas people born in an affluent western country will typically face less worrisome medical problems and have the opportunity to begin better paying careers.

I Can End Deportation (a.k.a ICED – www.icedgame.com) is designed to educate people about problems surrounding American immigration. It places the player in the shoes of a well-meaning immigrant who, despite spending his or her time paying taxes, donating blood, and giving money to homeless citizens, is just one misdeed away from being detained and deported. Various bits of information, such as the fact that immigrants can serve in the US military but can’t vote, pop up throughout the game.

Impact Games’ The Peace Maker (www.peacemakergame.com) gives players the power to make decisions necessary to bring peace to the Middle East. BBC Science & Nature’s Climate Challenge (www.bbc.co.uk/sn) is an infuriatingly difficult exercise in managing the policies, resources, and diplomatic relations of the European Nations as they relate to reducing carbon emissions. Darfur is Dying (www.darfurisdying.com), winner of a contest that tasked conscientious programmers to create a game about the Darfur genocide, provides players with a glimpse of what it’s like to be a Darfurian refugee foraging for water and facing such dangers as being kidnapped and either recruited or raped by Janjaweed militias. Indeed, if there’s a cause, chances are a game has been made in support of it.

However, the question of whether a game can be an effective means of communicating important ideas remains. Are people interested in learning something while they play? Are these games capable of keeping their players’ interest long enough to deliver their messages? Would you want to play a game that has been explicitly designed with no way to win, as is the case in many of these games?

Medium aside, who plays serious games? ICED was developed in conjunction with New York teachers, community organizations, and students, but will its unconcealed political agenda keep it from finding its way into classrooms and other environments capable of delivering it to the people it was designed to influence? A quarter of a million people have downloaded Real Lives, but are these the sort of people who could do with a lesson in global injustice, or do they already understand the inequities of birthplace?

Put plainly, are serious games preaching to the converted? It’s impossible to measure tangibly their impact on public opinion, especially since they often rely heavily on the Internet’s viral nature for their distribution.

However, while the efficacy of games designed to promote political causes is still unknown, they do prove at least one thing: There are game designers out there with ambitions to use the software they create to say something meaningful. And, from my perspective, that’s just one more step for games in their march to gain recognition as a legitimate art.

Next: The Political Machine 2008

Pages: 1 · 2