Janet Haven

I happened across the Serious Games Initiative today, a project which appears to be parked at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in DC. Despite the Monty Python-ish name, the SGI has outlined a challenging (and real) mission for itself:

The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy.

As Wired advised us last month, gaming is the new black: versitile, slimming, and goes anywhere, be it to college, to war, or to the boardroom. Given that, taking games seriously as a force for social change seems worthwhile -- at least in parts of the world where processor speed and connectivity make it a realistic avenue for online interaction. I'll be curious to see whether the third annual Games for Change conference in New York next month addresses any of the "internationalization" issues that shadow much of our work at OSI: language, bandwidth, appropriate hardware and software. The obvious answer is that "games for change" follow games for fun; wherever fun games work, social change games can probably be played. But would they be, outside of a specific training situation? A gaming novice like myself assumes that games are escapist, first and foremost, and educational or empowering much further down the line.

Two areas where it looks like "serious games" have made inroads are heath and education. One example is Pump Expeditions, a game created for kids and teenagers living with diabetes; the game's activities teach the importance of monitoring insulin levels and keeping track of overall health. Another popular game in the serious category, funded by the Sloan Foundation, is Virtual U, a game that lets the player pretend to be a university executive, deciding how to grow an educational instituation. Again, I wonder how possible it is to mix the viral popularity of non-serious games with serious topics. Virtual U looks to be a very useful template for learning about the difficulties of running an educational instituation, and yet the gaming scenarios outlined on the FAQ don't exactly make one want to give up on Grand Theft Auto just yet:

Scenario 1 Pay Faculty Better
Scenario 2 Allocate New Money
Scenario 3 Teach Better
Scenario 4 Improve Research Performance
Scenario 5 Win Games
Scenario 6 Reduce Tuition
Scenario 7 Respond to Enrollment Shifts
Scenario 8 Enroll More Minority Students
Scenario 9 Hire More Minority Faculty Members
Scenario 10 Balance the Budget

Well, it's probably more fun to approach it as a virtual world than it is to read a handbook by your human resources department about those topics, right?

So my question about these kinds of products is whether they work as *games*, in the sense of something that people do of their own free will, that engages creativity and releases the kind of "fun" endorphins that Tomb Raider clearly does -- or do they only work as simulated learning tools, which seems like a related but somewhat different category than "serious games". Perhaps my definition of games is simply too narrow, and games, in the computer sense, are any kind of graphical, digital interaction where decision-making takes place (which was, essentially, Wired's argument last month about the broader social value of games: their prevalence has created a generation of quick, good decision-makers). "Games for social good" is surely not a new concept, but it will be interesting to see at the meeting next month and beyond if a corner has been turned that puts these kinds of tools both in reach and in interest range of broader social movements.

UPDATE: A good example of a joint fun game/teaching game is A Force More Powerful, a joint venture of The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), York Zimmerman Inc., and game designers BreakAway Ltd. From the website:

A Force More Powerful is the first and only game to teach the waging of conflict using nonviolent methods. Destined for use by activists and leaders of nonviolent resistance and opposition movements, the game will also educate the media and general public on the potential of nonviolent action and serve as a simulation tool for academic studies of nonviolent resistance.