Reply With QuoteI've never owned a PlayStation. What havoc did Kojima wreak?
NY Times Article-Registration may be required- Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time
I'm not sure which part of the Qt3 population actually plays games like September 12 or the candle lighting game when we have, y'know, REAL games to play, or who is really interested in playing infomercial games like America's Army and Food Force. But with more and more attention coming to games which are "serious", will developers in the traditional gaming market be more inclined to produce games which get our their messages?
The Times article mentions a lot of the arguments against "serious" games, that the form is too trivial or too young, but also mentions how the same arguments have been used with other mediums, like poetry. But what it doesn't mention is whether gamers want to be told what to think in their escapes. We've already seen what havoc Kojima has wrought; do we really want some emboldened Sid Meiers to tell us that the best approach to international diplomacy is to back your words with nuclear weapons? There will always be "light" games as there is "light" reading; I'm just a tad scared at how the "heavy" games will be developed.
I think there is room for the didactic in games; it just needs to be subtle and integrated into the game play, like September 12th (ok, not so subtle). Right now it seems the only games that try to have a message do so in narrative cut-scenes before you get back to popping caps in the robot-monsters. Chromehounds, I’m looking at you and your "I love my country, mercenary" bullshit. How about instead when you go to control a village all the inhabitants, instead of fleeing, pelt your robot with rocks as you destroy their houses? Or in online play when advancing on the capital of the enemy there is heavy partisan activity and anti-<insert enemy's name here> graffiti. But that’s still just the environment; is there room in games for the mechanics to reflect a message without being too overbearing? Since development teams tend to be so large, I don't think a singular message could be so easily agreed upon which explains why we see things like Peacemaker, or small one man teams doing things like September 12 or that idiotic columbine game.
Can there be a game that takes a stance on global warming or illegal immigration that lets you blow up oil refineries or build fences? How about in the Political Machine 2 you can hijack the ballot boxes or sue for a recount? Just anything except cutscenes, please.
Last edited by Deadbuffalo; 07-24-2006 at 10:25 AM.
I've never owned a PlayStation. What havoc did Kojima wreak?
Perhaps i'm being a bit too dramatic. But Metal Gear Solid had a strong anti nuke theme throughout. MGS2 had um... something where you crawl into the rectum of this big robot arsenal thing and the president and public are controlled by the flow of information. MGS3 had some exposition into what it is to be a soldier and a bunch about brinksmanship. MGS4 apparently has a bunch on how America is creating mercenaries and losing influence in the world through its use of private military contractors. And then you fight a giant robot after a series of boss fights in each one.
Is this the Chris Crawford thread again?
"Games have to be fun? *harumph*harumph*"
I always felt there was some didacticism in Civilization:
*Communism will bankrupt you, but it's good for fighting aggressive wars.
*Pollution led to global warming.
*Evolution was true.
Those Civ examples aren't preachy, it just has some necessary choices made for game mechanics. It would be just as noteworthy if evolution *weren't* true in Civilization.
Also, Civ predates the "global warming is a lie" lobby, or at least my awareness of it. I played CivI when I was 12, I didn't know global warming was a fabrication of the wily Democrat until I was in my 20s.
I think you're overeaching.Originally Posted by Tim Partlett
1) Fundamentalism was the best for fighting aggressive wars.
2) Global Warming is/was a device to check industrial expansion.
3) There is no evolution in Civilization. You're the same monkey in 3000BC that you are in 2025AD. Just with better weapons and nicer clothes.
I suppose, if you were that kind of person, you could claim Alpha Centauri had something to preach about. Personally, I liked that the Planet was actually a faction of it's own, and that 'Become A Being Of Pure Thought' was a victory condition. :o
On the other hand, when most people accuse something of being preachy, it usually just means it's interrupting their discourses for them. The whole world is preachy, but as that Vancouver poet said "I'll see it when I believe it" :p
ahem!
I don't think it has to be preachy to be didactive, simply putting out a particular moral message.
There was certainly opposition to the idea of global warming in the early 90s, just as there is now. Same with evolution.
Don't think of it as a criticism, though, as it is my favourite game bar none. I was always aware of certain statements being made, but probably they weren't intentional.
With a game that purports to be a brief history of time, you have to decide on the first day of design whether your want your timeline to be in the thousands or the billions of years. There's really no way around it, unless you count "intelligent design".
1. There was no fundamentalism in the original Civ, but that could be seen as didactic too :).1) Fundamentalism was the best for fighting aggressive wars.
2) Global Warming is/was a device to check industrial expansion.
3) There is no evolution in Civilization. You're the same monkey in 3000BC that you are in 2025AD. Just with better weapons and nicer clothes.
2. So?
3. Darwin's Voyage was a wonder of the World!
[Plus Stroker Ace's quotation :) ]
I actually largely agree with the statements made by Civ (people usually see me as being aggressively pro-evolution), but I still think they could be seen as being didactic.
Games have lots of subtle messages, often unspoken. The entire Civ oeuvre is based on a "progress" model of history, for instance. Alpha Centauri and SimEarth both bought into the "Gaia Hypothesis" to one extent or another.
The so-called serious games movement has attracted a lot of former entertainment game people. The July/August CGM had my review of A Force More Powerful, one of the games mentioned in the Times story and one of the reviews I had the most fun writing. It was developed by Breakaway Games, the creators of the Civ 3 Conquests expansion and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom among others.
I'm an agnostic on the use of games as educational tools. If the message overwhelms the game, it turns into a nagging lecture on your screen. If much of the learning takes place in reading text (a la Europa Universalis), then you might as well just assign a good text book, since most people click through that stuff anyway. But if the message is too subtle or a little garbled then you may not be teaching anything at all, or, more likely, you are teaching something quite different than what you intended.
But why couldn't a Political Machine type game be used to look at the role of media in a modern democracy? Balance of Power captured the razor's edge of the Cold War quite nicely.
Troy
I don't doubt that you can create games that do some educating along with the playing, but if your goal is to learn about the Cold War, what's a better use of your time? Playing Balance of Power or reading a good history book on the subject? It seems to me that to make the claim for games being good educational tools, they need to give you a good return for the time you spend playing them vs. the time you could spend learning about the same subject from just reading a good book on it.
Games as art. Games as an alternative method of educating. It just seems like we're always trying to justify the time we spend playing these things to assuage any guilt we feel.
Ultima IV
Don't be silly. Do we only consider movies art because it can help justify the time we spend watching movies?
I think you could do some pretty rad stuff purely with gameplay. Cook up interesting Prisoner's Dilemma-type stuff or whatever. I think Civ does it, kinda. Why not? Kojima is a terrible game designer and all the philosophy stuff in his games is just Koontz-level idiocy. I'm gonna vote for Metal Gear fanboys as the worst in that other thread.
Would you like to play thermonuclear war?
As a matter of fact, yes! I'm very much looking forward to doing so.
Half-Life 2 sent a pretty strong message about oppression and resisting totalitarianism. And that message is that you'd better be a one-man army, because your fellow resistance fighters will be useless morons who'll gleefully wander straight down the street at a sniper.
This is certainly part of the equation, and why I am mostly skeptical about games as teaching tools. If the teacher/instructor eventually has to say "And this is what it is trying to teach you..." then the game has failed as an educational device, at least in the hands of that teacher; I've known teachers who couldn't create a coherent lesson out of primary documents.
And, like primary documents, games aren't a substitution for a good book or synthetic text, but could complement it. Or not.
But games *can* teach. The question is whether they teachGames as art. Games as an alternative method of educating. It just seems like we're always trying to justify the time we spend playing these things to assuage any guilt we feel.
a) anything important (Who the hell knew what a trebuchet was before AoK? Now they're everywhere. But does it matter?)
b) anything that you can't teach more easily in another format
c) lessons that are intended by the authors or not
Troy
For my part, I think that the crux of the issue with serious games is whether the 'problem-solving fun' that tends to accompany learning in games can be used towards problems that are serious in nature. On the other hand, there is a good and strong argument for using techniques and technology from game development to create more slick interfaces in serious applications. Game developers tend to pay more attention to interface and human-machine interaction than developers of other types of software. If those skills are applicable to industrial, serious, and social causes, then perhaps there is some credibility in the whole serious games movement (though I think the name 'serious games' is crap).
I think games that simulate can do a good job teaching if they do a good job simulating. You can probably learn a fair amount about flying different kinds of planes from MS Flight Sim. You can also argue that something like MS Flight Sim isn’t even a game.
You can also make a case for a game being able to stimulate thought and imagination in ways that a book or lecture cannot, so there could be some value there, too.
Finally, I can see some value in computerized learning using gameplay as a carrot to entice students to complete a lesson. For example, maybe there’s a computerized lesson on Roman history followed by a computer-graded test. Students who pass the test then get to play an Age of Empires scenario using the Romans. Kids could retake the test until they pass, but that would mean going back over the lesson to study -- something they might not otherwise do if there was no game as a reward.
I’m curious though – we’ve had games for thousands of years. Are there any non-electronic games that do a good job of teaching? It seems to me that if games could provide superior educational experiences, we'd have some examples. Are there any?
Teachers have been using games for a long time. Stock market games to teach economics, role playing to teach history, as well as less elaborate stuff to just get students into the mindset. I know some teachers have used Diplomacy. And education catalogs are full of custom made games.
The big strike against games in education - especially at the high school level - is time. Fifty minute periods can really work against teaching with games because you need to over the rules, find teams that work (you won't have 25 copies of anything), have time to debrief the exercise, etc.
Troy
I suspect that the real benefit to using games would be encouraging kids to learn outside of the classroom too. Of course, outside the classroom, you have to be careful about the unintended lessons like Civ IV's health penalty for jungle terrain.
- Alan
Everything with more cultural content than Tetris has something it's trying to tell you, intentional or not.
Every RTS in existence, for example, treats the lives of everyone but the king/controlling player as cannon fodder.
Games are excellent teaching material. I've found them particularly useful for using with students who aren't all that motivated*. Books give the most information per minute spent with them, but they are very hard work. Games are very light weight, but can transfer knowledge in a way that doesn't feel like work at all. Games engage a student's mind, whereas books and lectures tend to send them to sleep. I wouldn't advocate all teaching through games, but they are a very useful tool to keep the lessons varied and interesting.
*I used to be a lecturer.
What's unintended about that? Seems to me the Civ4 guys read through Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel or took a look at the present global infection rate of malaria and drew their own conclusions.
Out of the top of my head, I learned quite a bit about how cities are planned and modeled when I honestly had no clue before with Sim City.
I learned an incredible amount of my own history from mostly accurate simulations of the time, like Nobunaga's Ambition and Taiko Risshiden.
More Brain Training helps me keep my kanji writing ability with rarer and harder kanji alive in the Internet and computer age, where you don't write as much in hand-writing.
Sansara Naga helped me learn about various Eastern philosophy concepts originating from the Indian countries. As well I learned shitloads about obscure religions and myths from MegaTen series.
Virtua Fighter exposed me to the basics of a lot of different martial arts styles, as its by far the most accurate game thus far made to render them, though of course some changed for videogameness.
The Dark Eye exposed me to the deeper, less-looked-at sides of Poe and did so in a way that enflamed my passion to read more.
And now I'm learning how to cook new things! And that's just the stuff I can think up quickly.
-Kitsune
The Sims - Ultimate fulfillment in life is the direct result of collecting the highest quality commercial goods in a sprawling suburban McMansion.
-Scott-
The princess is always in another castle.
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