Modding Social Change by Antonio Lopez, UnderstandMedia.com Contributor
With choreographed SUVs ripping through pristine landscapes to hipster music, nature trashing is sold to us daily in tight 30 second fast-cut ads as a tonic for happiness. In-film environmental disasters become passive entertainment spectacles designed as backdrops for the heroic individual. Immersed in a corporate flow of images promoting simple solutions, it's no wonder that environmentalists often have a much tougher time conveying the complex networks of connections that underlie sustainable change. Attempting to communicate a deep sense of ecology in the mediaverse, it's easy to miss the organic forest for the pixilated trees./
However, a small but growing cabal of iconoclastic and evolutionary game designers feels that digital play could be the path to understanding deep systems. A group of industry practitioners and activists have been gathering at Gaming for Social Change (G4C), conferences organized by the Serious Games Initiative. At the one I attended last year in NYC last Fall, the discussion wasn’t just about swapping bloated pixel tits and screen splatter with dainty forest nymphs tilling virtual gardens. Weary of re-skinning old paradigms, these media activists, artists, and game designers are radically rethinking game-space itself./
Some popular games already gesture towards this emerging paradigm. Will Wright’s highly customizable The Sims enables open-ended play, allowing participants to build virtual families and careers, with a behavioral point system providing a built-in lesson on cause and effect. Sid Meier's phenomenally successful Civilization games series in which players build entire human societies from simple tool sets also creates awareness about the complex organization of the social order. But these games require an unrealistic conceit: there are no authoritarian, God-like positions that allow one person to single-handedly construct society (nor would we want one). By contrast, the Buckminster Fuller Institute is working to develop Spaceship Earth: The Game, a platform that teaches systems theory through collaborative exercises in which no single player controls the whole system. One gaming group, for example, is in charge of a virtual Brooklyn neighborhood, but must work cohesively with teams in charge of other "zones of agency." The difficulty that Spaceship Earth’s developers face is how to visualize these relationships. "The form of the game must be native to the game," says lead game designer Celia Pearce./
Typically commercial games construct a visual simulacrum of the world. Pearce wants to reverse this model by building game tools that can be deployed as memes in the physical world, in other words, designing augmented reality game that teach players how to solve problems in the human realm. While "modding" has given some players the limited ability to customize popular games such as Doom, conference participants call for open source game engines that would make ground-up development less cost prohibitive. Some hope that open architecture and tools can reframe what it means to “own” a game-space, turning game rules into Silly Putty. Others are looking to develop "augmented reality" games that access the growing anthill of public data, such as satellite imagery or census stats./
Design solutions are already emerging. Spore, a hybrid of Pac-Man, Populous and Civilization by The Sims creator Wright, tackles evolution in both form and content. Not only does the player evolve single cell life forms, the game contains an evolutionary development strategy inspired by the "demo scene" (European coders who've utilized efficient algorithms for quick and cheap textures and music). Here gamers literally build animations on the fly with simple visual construction tools, thereby eliminating the need to assemble tens of thousands of animations normally required in game development./
Ultimately, as NYU digerati guru Clay Shirky remarked in his keynote, "What a game does is what it means." Unlike traditional media narrative arks, which are about empathy, agency is the new paradigm in the same way that Gandhi instructed us to become the change we want. Thus playability becomes the fulcrum for restructuring our world. This leads some of the more mischievous in the crowd to point out that the best kind of play is transgression. As videogame designer and researcher Ian Bogost suggests, "Show how systems work, then disrupt them." From this perspective activists have an ideal medium for the message: when done right, game-space (or "magic circle" as it is called in the industry) is inherently subversive because it establishes a permissive space for structural transformation. Balancing systems awareness and the rebellious 'tude necessary to implement change may be the best potential of digital games yet./
Links:
Buckminster Fuller Institute -
http://www.bfi.org/
Serious Games Initiative -
http://www.seriousgames.org/
Persuasive Games -
http://www.persuasivegames.com/
