The Challenge of Political/Social Issue Games

I’ll start by taking an issue from Rowsell’s list. Imagine “DRM: The Game.” Doesn’t sound too exciting, right? Well maybe you could come up with something that convinces the player that DRM is bad and more pervasive than they expected. I can see something like that as a web-based serious game. Now, would you pay $60 for something like that at Best Buy? Can you imagine playing 15 hours of DRM: The Game? Some things seem to be left for shorter formats. Could you imagine DRM: The Movie being a commercial success? How about The Big Book of DRM on the New York Times Bestsellers List? Even if you can come up with something creative, how reasonably can you expect someone to pay money to engage with a political issue? If you were to say that a movie about working conditions would be able to make it in the theater, I’d ask that we think about how successful it would be in comparison to big-budget blockbusters.

I’d even be so bold as to guess that Blood Diamond wouldn’t have done as well had there Leonardo DiCaprio not been in it. How many people would have gone to see HBO’s “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” Hurricane Katrina miniseries had it been a feature film? I’m willing to bet not as many. To shoehorn political issues into the medium of the game is to do them a disservice.

Of course, a lot of this is the result of audience. Games are being played by certain kinds of people (though the demographic grows more diverse each year), game cost money, and games require time. As such, the retail disc of commercial video game production isn’t the best way to get across a message. People can’t be forced to care about certain issues, but they certainly be compelled. A good way to do this is to ask little of the player. Don’t ask them to spend money, don’t ask for a large time commitment. I would think this to be true of most forms of issue-discussion. This is why I think that the web is a great place for issue-based or serious games. Not to say we can never do it elsewhere, but it’s a good stepping stone.

“Okay, Bobby,” they might say. “You’re thinking about this all wrong. The game doesn’t have to be about these issues, they should just address them in some capacity.” I’m on board, in that case, but there are still hurdles to face. I don’t think I need to address why games can be good for discussing issues–I think there are books that do a good job at that. But people do need to consider how the issue is being portrayed: is it procedurally? narratively? spatially? audio/visually? Colin Rowsell doesn’t seem to know what kind of answer he’s looking for. Sounded to me like he’d want to play as a character coping with AIDS. But do you just integrate AIDS into the story? Does having AIDS somehow affect the way you play? Does developing AIDS change the world around you? Instead of asking why we aren’t talking about this in games, we should ask about how we would approach it.

We’re in the nascent stages of asking these questions– and, in some regards, the serious political topics Colin Rowsell is looking for are currently being discussed in more metaphorical ways. The film Reign Over Me features Adam Sandler playing Shadow of the Colossus as a way of coping with the loss of his family on 9/11. Shadow of the Colossus is a really fascinating game. You play as a boy trying to save the life of a girl by finding and killing giant colossi scattered throughout the lands. There’s something extremely sublime about taking down these giants–destroying a “monster” which never sought to harm you all for a “noble cause”. I’ll admit that I often felt terrible upon defeating a colossus, but was compelled to continue. It’s a game that’s not speaking about a single political issue, but rather the politics of the soul: making choices and facing consequences, creating metaphors that can be applied to so many things in the world. In some ways that’s much more mature than literally tackling an issue. It’s the same way a good poem doesn’t speak directly about its subject. Granted, Shadow of the Colossus is the exception in the industry, not the rule, but a goal worth striving toward.

Different kinds of games are better vessels for different kinds of discourse. And while the industry should expand thematically, we have to ask ourselves if we really want the kind of “ripped from the headlines” scripts of Law and Order just for the sake of raising issues, or if we would rather see a more evolutionary approach to make games that seeks to take advantage of (whatever we believe) they’re good at. Colin Rowsell does the gaming industry a disservice in only asking (paraphrased for effect) “hey, where all the political games at?” The question itself accomplishes nothing. We can’t just ask for the commercial videogame equivalent of Paris Is Burning or Tuesdays With Morrie and call it a day. We instead need to think about the many ways games can (and do) talk about our world using the strengths of the medium and how we can imagine them being employed now and in the future.