Games, Communities, Change

Why am I spending my last business day before E3 offsite? Either I'm crazy or at an event I really care about. Well, the first one's certainly up for discussion, but the latter is quite true -- it's time for the 2009 Games For Change event held annually here in New York.

If you've never heard about Games For Change, it's an event that brings together game designers and researchers with educators, non-profits, activists and all kinds of groups with a common interest: Exploring how games can be used to educate, inspire and motivate players toward social change and community activism.

G4C was actually the very first full event I ever covered as a journalist -- I think back in 2006 was my first time attending? It was my first freelance assignment for Gamasutra before I ultimately came to be employed there, and I was very excited and very proud.

When socializing around the lecture rooms, I'd begin the sort of "hey, what do you do and why are you here" conversations that are common at these kinds of things. I met a good deal of people who said they wanted to make video games for some cause or other -- and yet I met very few people who knew what Gamasutra was. Or Game Developer Magazine, or GDC, or any other publication, event, community that people who make video games consider to be must-see-and-do.

In other words, there were a lot of very well-intentioned folk looking to enter the video game space while knowing nothing at all about it. Over the past few years this has changed -- last year, for example, while covering for Kotaku, I met a designer who'd left the Halo team at Bungie in order to pursue socially-minded game design.

This year, I'm seeing two major trends: firstly, a lack of compartmentalization between these formerly disparate communities all interested in the common goal of using games for social good. Everyone's much more on the same page, I'd say. Secondly, there's a lot more interest -- finally! -- in the things mainstream, existing games have already nailed down.

On that second item, I used to notice a tendency to sort of throw the baby out with the bathwater and reinvent the wheel -- or any fairly dated metaphor I could use to explain how the activist community used to dismiss existing lessons from commercial games as fairly negative or useless.

Now, they're paying much more attention to things like the way BioShock encouraged an entire community of gamers to discuss Rand-ian Objectivism; the way the Resident Evil 5 controversy encouraged plenty of debate, much of it healthy, on race and games; the way the Six Days In Fallujah controversy really caused many people to discuss and examine what the role of games could and should be in relation to "the real world."

On an "Ethics in Game Design" panel, they talked about how games should confront, rather than avoid, moments of making the player unhappy or uncomfortable -- these kinds of experiences are essential to teaching players empathy. Getting "screwed over" on loot distribution in World of Warcraft, for example, can help players relate to others who've been treated unfairly, if the parallels are presented in the right context.

There's also been a lot of talk here about The Sims and the profound effect open worlds and communities can have on their players -- that was a focal point of a really interesting conversation I covered between Henry Jenkins and Jim Gee, who basically agreed that by creating community, a game can be a gateway to action and inspiration, rather than a be-all and end-all on its own.

UPDATE: Speaking of The Sims, I had a really awesome talk with Maxis boss Lucy Bradshaw about how the design philosophy in The Sims and Spore, by providing an open environment in which players collaborate and learn by doing, helps drive engagement in two ways: by creating community, and by letting players fail a little bit.

By the way, these ideas about how essential it is to let players be frustrated, let them mess up, let them fail and let them learn from it, have really set my gears turning about why I've struggled lately to tap into the same passion and motivation around games as I had when I was younger.

I'm flying out to Los Angeles on Sunday morning, ready to hit the ground running for E3 next week with my excellent crew of colleagues. I'm kind of excited, and I hope to be blogging a little here and there from E3 and keep you all updated on what we're up to out there!

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