Computer Gaming And Real Life Applications…

There’s a pretty good article in the ‘Indy’ about the uses to which computer game technology and theory could be put in the future:

Nobody could argue that the £30bn video gaming isn't by definition a serious business. But can games themselves ever be put to "serious" use? Could the same medium that offers us so much fun and entertainment also be a tool for raising political and social awareness?

He describes a typical ‘worthy’ game, though not in terms that make it seem like a fun way to spend a few hours…

Playing Darfur is Dying couldn't be easier, so long as you have a computer and an internet connection. Visiting the game's website, you are instantly thrown into the fray: a window in the centre of your screen asks you to "choose a Darfurian to represent your camp". A family of two parents and six children are your charges: displaced by conflict, the game asks you to perform such tasks as foraging for water, irrigating crops, and generally trying to survive the appalling rigours of life as one of the 2.5 million refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan (a context that's clearly explained in a couple of sentences underneath the game window onscreen).

Sounds awfully right-on, but I think I’ll stick to ‘World of Warcraft’ and Cabelas’ hunting games, if it’s all the same to you.

Well, unless the graphics and gameplay improve in the no-doubt already planned sequel, ‘Haiti is Collapsing!’…

Ethically, Darfur is Dying is hard to fault. As a game, however, its limitations are painfully obvious. It's a little confusing, and "fun" has been rather too scrupulously avoided; or, a little more generously, its idea of "engagement" is somewhat dour and limited.

A game devised by progressives to make us all feel guilty and donate money is ‘dour and limited’? Say it ain’t so!

Suzanne Seggerman is the New York-based founder of the organisation Games for Change, a group founded in 2004 that promotes the use of video games as tools for raising political and social awareness. As she sees it, "fun" is an inadequate description of what video games do in the first place. "I don't think the word is really right, I don't think a game has to be 'fun'. It has to be engaging, it has to be well-designed: what makes a game good is the balance of challenge and reward, and that is about learning."

I wouldn’t do them myself if they weren’t fun, though, and I’m not alone in that, as we’ll see…

At every step of a well designed game, you are engaged – but not necessarily entertained. It's a process she believes is fundamentally akin to some of the most serious issues in the world today. "More and more we are recognising in the 21st century that the kind of problems we face globally are genuinely complex. They involve many interrelated variables: things relating to climate change or international trade, for example. Games are systems, and they offer a good way to explore complex systems, a way that we simply didn't have before." There is, in other words, no better way to understand a complex system than by experiencing it: by role-playing, shifting variables, and seeing how the outcomes are affected.

But, Susan, you have to want to explore those systems in the first place. If your game isn’t fun, then you aren’t going to get people playing it.

There is tremendous enthusiasm for politically and ethically engaged gaming within much of the industry, but not – yet – the level of support from major developers and publishers that would be needed for the phenomenon to gain critical mass in terms of design and production values.

That’s because they know what sells. And so far, it isn’t ‘worthy’ games.

. The idea that I might have been really entertained by Darfur is Dying is a somewhat uncomfortable one. Wouldn't the fact that I really enjoyed running a virtual refugee camp be, in some ways, inherently trivialising the issues involved?

I guess that’s probably why there isn’t a ‘Sim Concentration Camp’ amongst the plethora of ‘Sim City’ and ‘Theme Park’ derivatives…

Seggerman rejects this idea, pointing to rapidly expanding array of titles that her organisation is already linked to from their website, titles that model everything from Third World farming to spotting signs of addiction in others to developing sustainable energy resources for cities.

But are they outselling ‘Call of Duty’, Susan?

They aren’t, are they. They are the sort of things that people have to be forced to play.

The rest of the article is very good, however, looking at the way gaming technology has been used by the army, what doctors could learn from it, and how it is gradually becoming the norm in schools.