Previous entry: Deloitte Partnership Creates Virtual Cash for United Way | Home Page | Next entry: Announcing Open Registration for the Games for Change Festival
Debatable Review on ICED
Posted by Hsing Wei on 03-18-08Over at Watercooler Games, Ian Bogost wrote a detailed review on I Can End Deportation (ICED) that raised some larger questions for debate about the stumbling blocks and potentials of games on social and political issues.
Human rights organization, Breakthrough, recently released ICED, a game that “puts you in the shoes of an immigrant to illustrate how unfair immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights.” Press including MTV News, GameDaily and Huffington Post have highlighted and praised the recent release.
Bogost’s more critical review raises a worthwhile conversation about the importance of compelling game design (even well funded commercial games can miss the mark). His main critique is that the game does not enable a deep enough exploration of the issue to match Breakthrough’s message; the game provides “an allusion to the complexity of life as an immigrant without any procedural representation of that complexity.” Rather than game play that is a “dressed-up fact quest” he suggests that the game could be more hard hitting if it increased its “rhetoric of failure.” (A heavy gamer’s taste may not be the same as the average player, would recommend reading the comment thread and Heidi Boisvert’s description about the heavy beta testing with users during the design process and the positive response the game and its mechanics has received from its target market).
Aside from game design, the review also raises for debate the question of whether the design quality for social change games is less important than the public attention assured by just the very concept of creating a video game about injustice X, Y, or Z. (More on the buzz the game has sparked over immigration here) Will the main impact of games for change come in the form of publicity and public response rather than in player experience? Bogost eventually argued for player experience, but it is worthwhile considering the arguments for strength in both (and in other attributes).
Bogost notes that a player’s access to the details of Breakthrough’s argument requires downloading an 80MB file and then playing the game for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, anti-immigration groups used the game’s release to restate and advance their own positions. Descriptive game play rather than game play that realistically simulates the experience of immigrant life under conflicting laws, Bogost felt, did not face off well against the equally defensible oppositional rhetoric that ICED drew from foes. Bogost’s answer is to craft better player experiences by letting players “suffer the desperation of incarceration” and “feel the frustration of investing time and energy in civic progress that makes no difference in trial”. (For a counterargument: an MTV News article discusses why the game developers chose to temper the negativity of play experience. Or play the game and draw your own conclusions).
Another sentiment in the review worth debating is the notion that it is problematic if the majority of social change games are created by non-profits—thus leading to “strong, well-crafted videogame messages about social issues” but lacking “more bravado, more risk, and less design by committee” that is demanded to produce something truely compelling. On the comment thread, g4c’s Suzanne Seggerman weighs in on the tremendous resources that nonprofits bring to the equation.
ICED was conceptualized and tested with 100 new york youths as well as immigration experts, immigration advocates, detainees, and lawyers. That participatory design process itself also enabled Breakthrough to spread its message and engage those youths on the intricacies of the issue. Like many nonprofit organzations, Breakthrough brings to the table its content expertise, in-built community and desire to engage that community. (The organization also aims to create curriculum for high school so that ICED can become a social studies teaching tool).
The unique, fresh perspectives and resources of nonprofits should not be discouraged. The tricky piece (aside from linking to sufficient funds and design expertise) is collaboration in how to balance and allow for all those pieces - learning via game design, awareness via game release and publicity, and engagement via game play and game community conversation. Improvement on all those leverage points is what will truely maximize the value of such games as a public intervention.
** note: edited from original post