Saving the World, One Game at a Time
When most of us think about online games, apps like Farmville on Facebook or massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft come to mind. In the past few years, however, a new trend has been emerging around the development of online games for social change. Social entrepreneurs and issue-driven organizations are creating and hosting online games to engage supporters of all ages, with aims of raising awareness about sociopolitical issues and current events, building communities, and teaching new skills.
A Growing Field
One of the leaders in this field is New York-based Games for Change, a nonprofit focused on digital games for social change that “seeks to harness the extraordinary power of digital games to address the most pressing issues of our day, including poverty, education, human rights, global conflict, and climate change.” Their annual festival brings together leaders from NGOs and nonprofits, government agencies, academics, and members of the gaming industry to share their experiences and discuss new trends. They also created a toolkit for organizations interested in creating social issue games and are in the process of developing a game component for the transmedia project Half the Sky, which is based on the nonfiction book by Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.
They have also collaborated with the Parsons the New School for Design in New York City to launch PETLab, a game design and research lab that explores how games can be used for public interest engagement.
Earlier this year, leading game designer Jane McGonigal delivered a lively TED talk, “Gaming Can Make a Better World,” and explored the question: “what if we could harness gamer power to solve real-world problems?" McGonigal believes that while we often play games to escape real-world suffering, there is a real potential to use them to teach new skills and to help young adults develop the capacity to solve real-world problems.
Games to Play
MiniMonos is a “virtual world for good green kids” to learn about community, generosity, and sustainability. The game was created by Melissa Clark-Reynolds, who was one of the first two New Zealanders to be trained by Al Gore as a Climate Project Ambassador.
The game has inspired its players to take action offline as well, running their own campaigns to be more eco-conscious and live greener lifestyles.
This free game, supported by MTV, is a narrative-based simulation where the user acts as a displaced Darfurian and negotiates forces that threaten the survival or his or her refugee camp.
iCivics, a web-based game that teaches students civics, grew out of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s concern that today’s students are not getting the proper information and tools needed for civic participation. The games touch on a number of topics, including civic participation, voting, separation of powers, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the branches of government.
Urgent EVOKE is a popular massively multiplayer online game (MMPOG) sponsored by the World Bank Institute. The game, targeted toward young African university students, challenges players to act as social innovators and solve global crises. The first “season” was launched March 3, 2010, and concluded on May 12. Check out the trailer below.
In an interview, Jane McGonigal, the game’s director, described EVOKE's purpose and how players take what they learn online and translate it into offline action:
Players take on three missions each week. They learn—basically, filling their brain with information about the topic. They act—doing something in real life to implement what they’ve learned. And they imagine. What could they do about this problem today if they had a team, money, and resources? That’s what social innovation is all about—scaling up local solutions to make big, sustainable solutions that can spread....The first week, the episode is about a scenario 10 years from today when there’s a major famine in Tokyo. Players learn about the issue of food security. They do something in real life to increase the food security of at least one person they know. And then they imagine a bigger solution. Meanwhile, real experts (from the field of social innovation, World Bank Institute, and other domains) are watching, mentoring, and giving feedback. At the end of the game, we’ll set up year-long mentorship for people who have ideas. They’ll get support to develop their ventures. We want the game to be a springboard to real action.
Players who successfully completed the 10 game challenges in 10 weeks earned the title “Certified World Bank Institute Social Innovator—Class of 2010,” gained online mentorships with experienced social innovators and business leaders from around the world, and received scholarships to participate the Evoke Summit in Washington, D.C.
The first season of the game was extremely successful: 18,500 "agents" from more than 150 countries took part in more than 30,000 missions and quests. According to one participant, Nathaniel Fruchter, “As of the writing of this, we currently have roughly 19,000 members with about 10 to 20 percent of them categorized as truly active. For an ARG [Alternate Reality Game], a game, a community—that’s unprecedented.” Over 10 percent of the players came from Africa, right on target with what the game's developers had hoped for.
Local Engagement Games (LEGs) are location-based games designed for a specific location “with the intention of integrating into local cultures and local institutions.” LEGs were developed by Eric Gordon, an associate professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College, and his team at the Engagement Game Lab.
Two games developed by Gordon’s team aim “to foster community and commitment to civic life": Participatory Chinatown is a 3-D role-playing game designed to be integrated into the master planning process of Boston's Chinatown. CommunityPlanIt, a location-based mobile game platform currently in development, is designed to engage neighborhoods in official planning processes, while forging geographically-based communities and advocacy groups around local issues. Could LEGs change the way we interact with our communities?
Tech giant IBM produced this game where players take on missions affecting today’s cities, from preventing overutilization of the electrical grid to bringing an internet banking business to the market. This "serious game" aims "to prepare professionals to work smarter by enabling them to visualize the consequences of their actions and explore different permutations of events in a visceral way."
UNICEF’s Ayiti: The High Cost of Living
This role-playing game challenges players to learn what it's like to live in abject poverty, all the while struggling to stay healthy and get an education. The player is responsible for a family of five in rural Haiti and must choose a strategy—health, education, happiness, or money—and see what outcome is achieved (check out the screenshot below). For example, the player must decide between using money to send a family member to school or to go to the hospital.
United Nations Foundation’s Deliver the Net
The Nothing but Nets initiative developed this game to teach younger supporters the significance of distributing bed nets in developing countries. The challenge is for the player to deliver as many insecticide-treated bed nets as possible to African families before the suns goes down and mosquitoes come out.
Stop Disasters was developed for International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), an organization that is part of the United Nations initiative to coordinate disaster reduction activities around the world. This game teaches kids the basic urban planning skills needed to save lives and reduce the impact of a natural disaster. Players work through five different scenarios—flood, earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, and wildfire—and under a time constraint and a budget, must determine how to avoid disasters.
PeaceMaker, inspired by real events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, challenges players to bring peace to the Middle East. Acting as the Israeli prime minister or the Palestinian president, players react to unpredictable events and attempt to create virtual peace and be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
These intense role-playing games look at a number of real-life situations, including checkpoints at Jerusalem border, crossing the border between Mexico and America, a potential civil war in Guatemala, the plight of child soldiers in Uganda, and the struggles faced by people working in Bangladeshi sweatshops.
Newcomer Global Mind Games recently launched its first game, Global Innovation Game (GiG), to engage aspiring and serial entrepreneurs in solving real world problems. Fred Skoler, president and executive producer at Global Mind Games, describes the appeal of the game: "Global Innovation Game teases out inventive ideas, rewards mentorship, expands a player’s business network, and creates a platform to showcase strategy, creativity, and expertise."
Played on Facebook Platform, GiG challenges players to share innovative solutions for problems impacting communities across the globe. To succeed, players must collaborate with each other to drive up the value of their solutions or take down their competition.
What Happens Next?
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof says that online games can be used “to connect emotionally [and] to create this entry point that begins to get people to become more informed and to get involved.” Games like those mentioned above act as launching pads for players to begin thinking critically about real-world issues and to consider taking action offline.
But will these online games spur a new generation of players to leave their virtual worlds and work for social change in the real world? Also, amongst the proliferation of online games, how can games for social change stand out?
Have you taken part in an online game for social change? Do share your experiences below.
