Serious Games part 1
[ Posted by Nathan Mishler Thu, 10 May 2007 18:51:59 GMT ]
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.
