My reaction? These developers make me angry.
Look, it’s all well and noble that people want to change the world for the better. But heavy handed attempts with games like “Darfur Is Dying” and “United Nations’ Food Force” is not the way to go. People play games to have fun first and foremost, not to get preached to. And giving people electric shocks so they can experience pain and anguish is just plain silly in my mind.
I think some of this desire to make games more “accepted” is to make perceptions of the industry more prestigious. After all, games aren’t “taken seriously” by most old media critics, and I think this burns many developers who want this kind of prestige for their medium. I also suspect some of them are pushing a social agenda. PeaceMaker for example gives players who get the highest score a Noble Peace Prize, while the lowest gets a War Criminal rating.
Take for instance this entry from the blog of Asi Burak, Executive Producer of PeaceMaker, a game about the Palestinian\Isreali conflict:
For one thing, I can’t understand why a meaningful game like “PeaceMaker” is automatically labeled as an “educational simulation”. Yes, it may be a great tool in the classroom, but why not beyond that? PeaceMaker should be treated as a non-fiction book, a graphic novel (eg “Maus”) or a social impact documentary (eg “An Inconvenient Truth”). These are consumed by the mainstream. Yes, they are informative and serious but thanks to the maturity of the medium they became part of our leisure time. People watch TV news and learn about the world. No one calls this an “educational experience”. I really hope that video games will soon achieve the same level of maturity and acceptance so we can really break the boundaries of “fun and shallow”.
This is the wrong approach in my mind. You will not enhance the acceptability and seriousness of games if people are not willing to play the game in the first place. The gameplay experience must become more refined and accessible before games like this can achieve the kind of prestige Asi Burak wishes. And quite frankly, what little is shown about the game itself is unimpressive on a design standpoint. Why should someone play this game over say, World of Warcraft, Half-Life 2, or Oblivion?
Are games juvenile? To some degree I would agree with this. By why does “fun” have be associated with “shallow”? Is the profound necessarily a solemn and grave thing?
One last observation: everything I’ve read so far reminds me of post-modernist artists and their emphasis on the “message” over the technique. Which is abhorrent in my mind.
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