Saving the World One Game at a Time
The proposition may strike some as dubious, but the “serious games” movement has some serious brain power behind it. It is a partnership between advocates and nonprofit groups that are searching for new ways to reach young people, and tech-savvy academics keen to explore video games’ educational potential.
Surprisingly to some, these games are ifnding huge audiences. Since they are free, it wouldn't be surprising that they have some novelty factor, but people are playing them in droves. They are enjoying the games AND getting exposure to some of the extremely complex issues and tradeoffs at stake.
Given away free, they have found astonishingly large audiences. The United Nations game, Food Force, has been downloaded by four million players, a number to rival chart-busting commercial hits like Halo or Grand Theft Auto. In May, MTV’S college channel released an online game called Darfur is Dying in which players escape the Janjaweed while foraging for water to support their village: despite its cartoonish graphics, a strangely powerful experience. In the first month alone 700,000 people played it. Of those, tens of thousands entered an “action” area of the game — political action, that is — where they can send e-mail messages to politicians and demand action on Darfur.
But the question of whether people can learn moral lessons is still out there, since so much depends on thepoint of view and the game itself.
....as Professor Gee put it, some of today’s serious games reflect a simplistic point of view — like America’s Army, the military’s hit game that puts players in a soldier’s boots, or Under Ash, a Syrian-made game that has you play as a Palestinian fighter. “Building morally ambiguous worlds, that’s a lot harder,” he noted. “We’ve won the hype wars. People accept that games can be good for talking about issues. But now we need a killer app.”
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