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- Gaming The Poor
- The joystick generation is starting to
play its way to social consciousness.
- Tuesday,
July 11, 2006
- By Allan Madrid
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- You are a frog who happens to live
on a farm. Your aim is to pick up as many grapes, oranges and other
harvest fruit as you can in as little time as possible. But the
fruit is quickly going rotten, and you’ve got to compete with worms,
donkey and dragonflies. What’s more, the farmer might decide to
spray pesticides, which puts you in such a drunken stupor that
picking up fruit off the ground is a challenge. Whoever grabs the
most fresh fruit wins.
If this were an ordinary video game, the description would end here.
But in “Squeezed,” a socially conscious video game developed by
students at the University of Denver, there’s another reason, aside
from earning points, to continue to the end. You may be just a frog,
but you also have a family and community to support in a country far
away. The “juice” you collect from the fruits you pick up is paying
for schools and medical clinics back home. Without it, your family
may starve.
“Squeezed” is part of a growing trend of socially conscious games
that are as much about spreading awareness as entertainment. A small
group of activist game developers is trying to give the joystick
generation a political education through gaming. “Games are growing
up,” says Suzanne Seggerman, co-director of Games For Change, a
nonprofit organization that promotes developers of socially
conscious games. “They’re mature enough now to finally sustain real
world content.” This year’s third annual Games for Change
conference, held last month at The New School in New York, included
240 participants, up from 40 in 2004, when the first conference was
held. “I think we may have 10 really good games right now, which is
much bigger than it was even two years go,” says Katie Salen, a
director of graduate studies in design and technology at Parsons The
New School for Design. “It may not sound like a lot, but they
provide really good models of how to get these games in the hands of
the players.”
Like many activist games, “Squeezed” is intended to raise awareness
among relatively well-off young people by putting them in game
situations that resemble those of immigrants and poor people in real
life. The frogs, donkeys and dragonflies that work the farms in the
game serve as stand-ins for migrant workers from Latin America. The
game’s objective, says Mohammed Albow, a Ph.D. student at the
University of Denver who helped develop the game, is to allow
players to empathize with the immigrant experience in the United
States. “We wanted to make a system that creates an emotional
response from the players,” he says. “[The game] is not meant to
send a message for this side or the other, but we want players to
explore the views, to think about the subject.”
- Activist games are starting to get
some big-time attention. “Squeezed” comes out in September on
MTVu.com, MTV’s 24-hour college network Web site. (MTVu and Cisco
Systems gave $25,000 to the developers of “Squeezed.”) In August,
MTVu will hold a contest for the best idea for a videogame about
AIDS/HIV. Last April, MTVu released “Darfur is Dying” on its Web
site, which students at the University of Southern California
developed to raise awareness about the genocide. The game features
Sudanese refugees searching for water in the desert while trying to
escape the Janjaweed militia. MTVu was originally hoping the game
would attract 200,000 visits over its lifetime, but in the seven
weeks since its release more than 700,000 people have played. “The
best part of the game is that no one is hitting you over the head,”
says Stephen Friedman, general manager of MTVu. “You don’t need to
know anything about [the genocide], but little by little, it gets
under your skin. It puts you in the shoes of the Darfurians who have
to protect other Darfurians in a day-to-day basis.
- Other organizations are also getting
into the act. The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
invested $3 million and allied with commercial game developer
Breakaway LTD to create “A Force More Powerful,” a strategy game
that is intended to teach budding activists how to use non-violent
methods to influence government policies. “It allows you to plan
your own activism strategies and test them out,” says Hardy
Merriman, the director of programs and research at the International
Center on Nonviolent Conflict. And in June, Global Kids, a New
York-based non-profit, released “Ayiti: The Cost of Life,” which,
according to the developers, is “a role-playing game which models
poverty as an obstacle to education in contemporary Haiti.” Even the
United Nations has gotten into the act. Last year UNICEF released
“Water Alert,” in which players have to ensure that the residents of
a dry village have access to healthy water. In the World Food Programme’s “Food Force,” also unveiled last year, players have to
complete a series of missions ranging from dropping food parcels
from the air to using food aid to rebuild a country’s economy. The
free game was downloaded more than 1 million times in its first six
weeks online, according to the agency.
- Although these games can’t compete
in excitement with the likes of “Madden NFL 2006,” “Pokemon Emerald”
and “Gran Turismo 4,” some of the games make it by being
controversial. The developers of “PeaceMaker”, for instance, have
tried to simulate the violence and political turbulence of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Players choose between the role of an
Israeli prime minister or a Palestinian Authority president, making
policy decisions and communicating with the international community
while dealing with unexpected violent events. “[The game] is a very
good approach to a very hard conflict to resolve,” says Oren Ross,
23, who played the game for the first time at the Games for Change
conference. “You really get to experience that both sides want two
different things.” The game’s developers Asi Burak, a former Israeli
intelligence officer, and Eric Brown, a game developer, recently
formed a firm, ImpactGames, to develop and market the game. “We want
to get as many people as possible to play it and learn something
that they haven’t learned before,” Brown says. Developers are
currently testing the game in limited pilots in the United States
and don’t yet have a release date.
- Despite the excitement coming from
activists and digital game developers, most experts agree that these
activist games will probably not do well in the marketplace.
Entertainment, after all, is not the first priority. Mike Hong, a
junior at MIT who has played “Darfur is Dying” online, says activist
games are just not stimulating enough to catch his interest. “People
might buy these games for charity, but playing them just for
enjoyment? I don’t think so,” he says. Susana Ruiz, the lead
developer of “Darfur is Dying,” just hopes that the game will have a
small part in spreading awareness. First get the joysticks moving,
then see what develops.
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