The Ivory Tower

November 2003

Ideological Videogames: Press left button to dissent

by Gonzalo Frasca

"Videogames do not necessarily need to be entertaining". Such a statement is still likely to trigger passionate debates (albeit less likely than a few years ago). Who would play a game that is not fun? The answer, of course, relies on how you define fun and entertainment.

The question is trivial in other media, such as books or films. Certainly, thousands of movies and novels are made every year with the sole goal of entertaining their audience, while a similar amount supposedly aim at more serious goals such as generating debate, making a point, explaining something or sharing knowledge. The latter are not fun under the broader definition of the term, even if they do provide certain pleasures.

The question should be trivial in games, too. Actually, videogames were born for non-entertaining uses, as military simulators designed for training. There is also an extensive history of educational videogames with an explicit pedagogical agenda. These examples, which exist since the very beginning of the genre, should suffice to make the point that videogames can certainly have non-entertaining purposes. However, in my experience, most players react negatively to the idea of games that do not just aspire at being fun.

If videogames are indeed persuasive tools, then they can be used for conveying passionate ideas. If you want to know if a medium is ready to deliver an ideological message, simply ask if somebody would be willing to endanger her life for it. There are multiple cases of this in literature (i.e. Salman Rushdie) and it certainly happens in films, even though on a minor degree (Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ was violently boycotted).

Would somebody be willing to die for a videogame? I guess the answer is still no. Currently, it is more likely that games can simply trigger passionate arguments and some foul language. As a matter of fact, the moment I knew that my game September 12th had succeeded at conveying its ideas was when the first piece of hate mail arrived to my inbox.

Ideological videogames are games that you can agree or disagree with. Certainly, nobody disagrees with Tetris . However, as games started dealing with more realistic simulations of human life, the situation changed. A clear example is The Sims , which has been criticized for its supposed consumerist ideology (and defended by its author as anti-consumerist). Still, I think The Sims was clearly designed primarily as entertainment. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that, but personally I would also love to see more games with a clear agenda.

Before professionally working as a game designer, I worked in advertising and journalism. The connection between videogames and ads was clear for me since I saw a Budweiser banner displayed in Tapper , the classic bartender game. It was while working at CNN that I started daydreaming about creating games that would complement news with editorial statements, like political cartoons do. A few years later, I was finally able to launch Newsgaming.com with the help of a group of collaborators.

Newsgames, or games based on news events, are certainly not new. There are countless examples of games based on political and social events, as well as many created after the events of 9-11. It is on this tradition that I created September 12th , a game (even if its instructions provocatively claim that it is not a game) that tries to make a point about the war on terror.

Basically, the game models a Middle Eastern town showcasing mostly civilians and some terrorists. The player controls a crosshair with which it is possible to launch missiles. It is almost impossible to kill the terrorists without generating "collateral damage". Every time that a civilian dies, others will mourn him or her and, suddenly, become terrorists. After a few minutes of play, the number of terrorists is out of control.

If you are looking for a more detailed description of my experience with crafting September 12th , please see "Playing with reality", at Game-Research.com. I am not going to refer here to some common objections, such as the game being one-sided and its failure to showcase terrorists in action. Nevertheless, I would like to summarize in this article just a few aspects.

September 12th was conceived with two goals in mind. One was conveying a simple idea through a simple model: violence will create more violence. It was my hope that this idea would contribute to generate debate around the issue of the civilian casualties of the war on terror. The other goal was exploring the problems of creating actual ideological videogames instead of just writing about them from my nice and tall ivory tower.

The game certainly generated debate. A few weeks after its launch, more than 100 thousand people from all over the world have played September 12th . More importantly, half of the links pointing to it came from online forums and weblog comments, where both the game and its topic were discussed.

The game also generated criticism and was very often dismissed as too simplistic (which, of course, it obviously is). In part, this rejection may be due to what Sherry Turkle identifies in her book Life on the Screen as "simulation denial": some people believe that simulations cannot help us in understanding reality because they always offer a limited model of it. However, I think that a big part of this critique is due to the fact that political videogaming is not yet a well-established genre. Nobody would ever criticize a printed political cartoon on the basis of being too simplistic: caricatures are simplifications by definition. In spite of this, cartoons make a point and this is why they remain a useful journalistic tool.

We need more games that make statements. Surely, games and simulations will always be limited. Games will always be biased. Games will always be interpreted (and manipulated) in ways that its authors never foresaw. However, I agree with Sherry Turkle that games could also provide great insight:

"Understanding the assumptions that underlie simulation is a key element of political power. People who understand the distortions imposed by simulations are in a position to call for more direct economic and political feedback, new kinds of representation, more channels of information." ( ibid )

In order to accomplish this, us academics must join forces with developers and provide them with practical game theory or, even better, start making our own games. Personally, I see September 12th as a small experiment on game rhetoric. But the potential of videogames for critical thinking and debate is, I believe, much larger. It lies, I think, in providing players with tools to contest the game's ideological assumptions by designing their own games. Eventually, games will allow us to model our ideas and let others play with them and vice versa.

One of my most vivid childhood memories was witnessing my mother and aunt crying together as they burned most of their books in our backyard. This was during my home country's military dictatorship, when owning certain books was enough reason for being imprisoned and/or tortured. I wonder if some day somebody would hold a match in front of a pile of videogames and seriously consider burning them down in order to maintain their freedom. If that ever happens, it would mean that our civilization would have been able to turn a supposedly trivial medium into something that really matters. Thanks to Ray Bradbury, we know that books flame at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Who knows how much heat is needed to burn videogames?

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Gonzalo Frasca designs and produces games for Powerful Robot. His academic research focuses on game rhetoric and he holds a MS in Information Design from Georgia Tech. He edits Ludology.org, an online resource for game scholars, and he has recently launched, along with Ian Bogost, WaterCoolerGames.com, a weblog about persuasive games. Frasca is also a review editor at the Game Studies journal and leads the team behind Newsgaming.com. He is a former head of game production at Cartoon Network LA and Editor of Science and Technology at CNNenEspañol.com.