You might not think of Sandra Day O’Connor as a videogame enthusiast, but there she was in New York last month, giving the keynote speech at a videogame design conference. Just so you don’t get the wrong idea about the former justice, this wasn’t your normal group of game designers—the anarcho-nihilist techheads who dream up murderous shoot-’em-ups like Doom and Grand Theft Auto and Resident Evil. This was a group of gaming do-gooders who believe that videogames can make the world a better place by making people better.
The conference was hosted by an outfit called Games for Change (G4C), which gathered together an usual assortment of tech futurists, academics, media evangelists, and government hipsters, all of whom want to spur the creation of ennobling videogames.
People have been trying to make videogames good for you since the Apple IIe appeared in the early 1980s. Back then games such as “Lemonade Stand” and “Oregon Trail” tried to teach rudimentary lessons about math and planning. “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” taught geography and some small-bore history. But the Games for Changers are interested in moral instruction. As their website helpfully explains, the Games for Change Annual Festival “brings together leading nonprofit organizations, experts, and game developers to explore the increasing real-world impact of digital games as an agent for social change.”
The leaders and experts were the usual suspects. Naturally, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation was there, both as a sponsor and a participant. The foundation has been the biggest dupe in the digital world since 2007, when it was suckered into giving $550,000 to sponsor conferences inside the virtual world “Second Life.” The digitally omnipresent NYU media professor Clay Shirky was there too. His contribution was to explain that the Internet is enlarging both “the radius and half-life of generosity.”
Shirky is one of those technophiliacs who surf from conference to conference on a wave of babble. In a recent interview with Wired, he explained the human animal thus: “Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.” Shirky’s Big Idea is that the Internet is replacing television as the activity on which modern man wastes his free time. And that, as Wikipedia, YouTube, and LoLCats demonstrate, the Internet is better for us than television. Or at least, that’s his Big Idea this week. A year ago his Big Idea was that the Twitter Revolution in Iran was “the big one”—a seachange in which social media were altering the course of real-world events.
Next to people like Shirky, the representatives from the public sector looked serious-minded and judicious. The White House’s chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, told attendees that the Obama administration was trying to move citizens away from thinking “there’s a form for that” and toward thinking “there’s an app for that.” Chopra was joined by Kumar Garg, of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who said that the president’s team is very interested in videogames. Garg said that his office is exploring ideas about how the White House could “empower” the “gaming community.” Sara DeWitt was there from PBSKids.org—Public Broadcasting’s online destination for parents who want the computer, instead of the television, to babysit their children. DeWitt said that the videogames are her site’s biggest draw and that these games help children “learn how to interact socially online.” In one of the breakout panel discussions it was suggested that the government should create a National Public Games corporation in the mold of National Public Radio.
There were “Twambassadors” roaming the conference and sharing their real-time observations about the affair with other attendees on a G4C Twitter list.
Leaving the farcical elements aside, G4C is serious about making socially instructive videogames. Which is what drew Justice O’Connor to the conference. Even though she’s retired from the Supreme Court, she’s still an agent for social change. Upon returning to private life, O’Connor discovered—who knew?—that American children know very little about the civic institutions. In 2008 she partnered with Georgetown University to create iCivics, a website full of videogames to teach people about government.
iCivics began with a judicial branch game, Argument Wars, in which players fight Supreme Court cases by choosing arguments in front of a stern, futuristic-looking judge. Later, games about the other branches were added. In LawCraft, you add amendments to a bill in an attempt to garner majority support. In Executive Command, you’re a president who chooses a broad goal for his term, and then has to manage various crises while still pursuing his agenda. Oddly enough, though you can choose “deficit reduction” as your primary goal, the game offers no opportunities to cut spending and penalizes you if you refuse to raise taxes.
All told, the iCivics games are just about as boring as you imagine they are. But they are immeasurably more engaging and less pedantic than the other games G4C is promoting.
A slog through the games featured on the G4C website is dreary, even by edutainment standards. There’s Ayiti: The Cost of Life, where you control a rural Haitian family and decide to either send your kids to school or put them to work. No matter what you do, you run out of money and everyone gets sick. There’s 3rd World Farmer, where you plant crops and raise livestock, only to see them wiped out by disease and fires at the end of every turn.
The makers of Raid Gaza believe that their game “demonstrates the power imbalance between Israel and Gaza.” It begins with a pathetic Palestinian rocket crashing harmlessly in a field. An Israeli adviser then prompts the player to “hurry up and blow the Gaza Strip up before anybody else gets hurt! . . . You get 5 minutes. Eliminate as many Palestinians as possible.” Players are given ironic “bonuses” for hitting Palestinian hospitals and U.N. school buses. A counter keeps track of how many Palestinians are killed. I confess that the game had an effect quite opposite the intended one.
Another game, Against All Odds, is about life in a totalitarian state. Produced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the game opens with your character being arrested by the secret police. Players are “interrogated” and asked to sign a series of statements—for instance, your tormenters want you to declare that homosexuality is a crime and then to give up your “right” to speak and write in your native language. If you refuse any of their requests, you’re beaten by the guards.
The first time I played Against All Odds, I quickly figured it would be smart to tell the police whatever they wanted to hear. Would I sign a statement giving up my right to vote? Sure thing. Would I give up the right to travel outside the country? You betcha. With every acquiescence, the game rebuked me with a description of the terrible life I was agreeing to live. When I signed a pledge of unconditional support for the government, the game sadly informed me that I had “given up the right to think differently.” The game grew more and more unhappy until, at the end of the interrogation, it informed me—somewhat disappointedly—“That went well . . . this time!” Despite my spinelessness, I was told to flee the country anyway.
The entire Games for Change concept is of a piece with the central conceit of the Internet: that you can change the world without having to actually do anything.
Want to change America? Download the Obama app. Want to fight the Iranian mullahs? Turn your Twitter icon green. Want to bring human rights to oppressed peoples? Play a videogame about it. Because what matters isn’t fighting autocrats or feeding the hungry or improving the conditions of Haitian farmers. What matters is knowing that you care about such things.
Games for Change isn’t really about the dissidents, the starving, or the wretched: Like the Internet itself, it’s all about you.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
