Gamer's Paradise: How to Make Games For Change You'd Actually Want to Play

Games can motivate and reward positive behavior, say those who are leveraging interactive entertainment for social good. Put more simply, many people think games can change the world and make activism, education and fundraising more exciting.

The annual Games for Change conference, held last week in New York, is now in its 10th year. It’s an exploration of this potential, bringing together academics, nonprofits, game developers and other disciplines to discuss and explore games for social good.

Quandary received the Games for Change award for Game of the Year. Designed for 8-14 year olds who are asked to shape a new society, it explores challenging ethical and moral questions.

It’s been an interesting journey for change games. Educational and charity games were once commonly known as ‘serious games,’ to differentiate them from games for entertainment and distraction. These days most people working in the field admit the ‘serious games’ label is ineffectual, misleading, and generally making a plodding school-room endeavor out of the complex and exciting potential in designed interaction.

Yet no one really seems to know what, exactly, to call games designed for some purpose other than exhilaration. People reluctantly wield finger quotes, or speak rapidly over litanies of alternative names: games for change, games for good, social issue games, news games. The struggle for vocabulary isn’t new, it just seems more prominent lately, as the explosive democratization and diversification happening in all facets of gaming touches this still-nascent arena and asks it to re-evaluate itself.

Recently inducted into the Games for Change Hall of Fame, Hidden Agenda, is a change game from the 1980s that lets players navigate a complex web of political relationships as the president of a fictional country.

But some of this political upheaval is actually good for the change games space. In all this self-examination, the field has the opportunity to be relevant to new people in new ways.

At the event, scholar, author and game designer Ian Bogost suggested that those interested in using games to change the world think not about seriousness, but of earnestness. Many times, organizations find themselves trying to “add” games to an existing program or curriculum like a seasoning that supposedly livens their topic with the modern magic of a new interactive frontier -- without actually thinking about whether games enrich their objective, or whether the games they make are good by any measure.

Even the White House has, in Bogost’s view, erred some in trying to use games to excite families and kids about health. The government’s Apps for Healthy Kids doesn’t necessarily function well as a “game,” but instead as a rhetorical exercise that makes the government look cool, technological and “plugged in” on an important social issue.

Pick Chow! won first place in the White House's Apps for Healthy Kids challenge.

How can games embrace quality game design and still benefit social issues? For one, the game needs to be good independently of any charitable endeavor: That’s the objective of the Global Gaming Initiative and It Matters’ Sidekick Cycle, a cycle-racing app that gives a portion of its proceeds directly to World Bicycle Relief, where in-app purchases by players lead tangibly to providing real-world bikes where they’re needed in Africa. This, the developers hope, solves one major challenge to charitable giving in general: People want to see exactly where their money is going and what it’s being used for.

But there are further steps. Designer Jesse Schell’s project, Game Sprout, provides an open community-oriented platform where kids can submit game design ideas and build projects through public vote and with the mentorship of experienced game developers. He spoke at Games for Change about the challenge teachers tend to face in reconciling different kinds of learners, and suggested those teachers would be eager for software that helped them take education further while bridging the gap among different student styles.

Remember the teacher that challenged and inspired you most, and then develop a game they’d want to integrate in their curriculum, Schell suggests. Just a simple shift in perspective -- imagining a meaningful target market for the game you want to make -- can take educational play from simple conceptual exercise into something that may actually be useful in the classroom.

Data Dealer takes an ironic look at privacy and data ownership. Games for Change awarded it the Most Significant Impact title.

Games for social good can go further still. Game creation tools are more accessible and affordable than they once were in a prior age. We’ve covered the individual games movement here at The Creators Project in the past, describing how accessible tools enable people who might not previously have been able to make a game create touching, personal works about their lives.

That means rather than have academic and nonprofit sectors commissioning games about social issues, those directly affected by the issue themselves can make games that express their feelings and needs. Creators once thought a game had to be “fun” to engage players around a real-world issue, but perhaps they also need to engender empathy -- what better application for an interactive, personal medium?

Imagine a classroom setting where instead of playing a social issue game, students were encouraged to make expressive interactive works about a problem in their own lives, for example, and learned to understand one another better by playing one another’s games?

Game making is itself empowering, and learning to make them can teach kids tech skills and lower the intimidation barrier to further tech education. The conversation about how games can change the world gets ever more broad the more democratic game-making becomes, an exciting turning point for games for change as a field.