Last week, I talked about how the FPS and other such similar amusements could eventually face change due to the behavioral psychology concept known as generalization. In layman’s terms, image overload. I stated that, eventually, violence in games will no longer have the appeal it enjoys today and that this represents a unique opportunity for developers of what I call progressive games to create real-time simulations that put the players in scenarios focused on solving some very big problems going on today both here and abroad, social issues like world hunger starvation, genocide, outright racism and the like. But my own focus is to go beyond awareness as a shot-in-the-dark hope that it will somehow change people’s minds. Rather, I want to provide an immediate call to action that translates into real-world impact.
No doubt, this is monumental. Most calls to action in games are to buy something, whether it be the branded item that’s been conveniently placed, i.e., a can of Coke, a Porsche or Nike shoes, music, or to download exclusive content that didn’t come with the disc you spent $59.99 on, the typical price for new platform games when they arrive on the market that’s been in place since the days of the NES. In fact, Sony is going completely digital with their new PSP Go. Why? Because they’ll have a captive audience. Just like you would see an ad before you viewed your ESPN.com clip, I’m willing to bet that Sony isn’t planning to make money off of the games.
So, we have a situation where things may be in flux and a difficult environment to make an impact given the capitalistic nature of the video game industry. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just a fact of reality. And it’s this profit motive we have to work with as progressive game developers. Let’s now add a third roadblock: the games themselves. Presently, at least as it’s been my observation, progressive games in their current form don’t have a “cool” factor. They either try to oversell the fact that they are a “serious game,” look quite primitive compared to Halo or Gears of War, or have kludgey game play. The worst have all three going for them. Furthermore, they tend to avoid inclusion of grains of reality in their set-up scenarios.
The U.N’s Food Force is a good example and is available for download here. In the food drop scenario, your commander extols the virtues of feeding the hungry and the need to make sure the plane drops the crates of food on the right target spot. Well, OK, but don’t UN workers get shot at all the time? What happens if the population is hostile toward you? If I’m playing a UN worker, why does my superior need to give me the pep talk since I’ve already chosen to risk my life to help the world’s indigent? I think you see what I’m getting it.
I’ve been wrestling with how to bring a game to market that doesn’t try to be holier-than-thou, will hopefully make a profit or at least garner some attention, looks sophisticated or at least, is as good technically as the best casual games on the market and doesn’t try to be another Halo or Gears yet gives the player just as much enjoyment. What a challenge to design and make such a game!
As it so happens, I began doing research into the authority figures on persuasive games and came upon Ian Bogost, co-founder of Persuasive Games, LLC. Just an FYI, what I call progressive games are better known in the industry as persuasive games. My terminology just has more of a political bent I chose to use given the current assault on progressive beliefs, and recent resurgence, with the election of President Barak Obama.
OK, now that we got that out of the way, I read through the excerpt of Ian’s latest book, Persuasive Games where he outlines his belief that games are a unique form of rhetorical communication tools. By rhetorical, he means the 2,500-year-old kind that the Greeks practiced in the days of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. These figures had a very specific formula for being able to articulate an argument effectively in front of hundreds of people. Ian explores these techniques as well as the importance of something he calls procedural rhetoric. He means procedural in the computer programming sense, that is, the underlying rules, bits, bites, zeroes and ones, that make-up a computer and enable the software it runs.
Suffice it to say, I was just as confused as much you might be right now regarding what one has to do with the other. But my curiosity was also piqued and I was eager to read further, hoping this guru would reveal all to me in this one excerpt of his book. While that wasn’t the case, it did open my eyes quite a bit and his argument made a ton of sense.
Maybe that was because he was using rhetoric? I’ll explain more in my next post. Stay tuned!
