Games for Social Good
Using games as a medium to improve the world through social awareness, political action, and civic engagement.
Let’s talk about games. Like any other entertainment medium, games have values baked into its design. Similar to a theme in a book or portrayals of characters in movies, a game’s interactive systems, or mechanics, can have bearings on players’ social perceptions. For example, the goal to save a damsel in distress is archetypical in classic video games, but generally depicts female characters as being weak, helpless, and objectifies as a prize for victory. Most of the time, these values aren’t ascribed maliciously, but as the medium develops and games reach an ever-expanding audience (currently larger than the movie and music industry combined), game designers need to be more conscious about how their games attach values to its mechanics.
Some game designers are already mindful of this and have taken the concept to the next level. By understanding how games present ideas, they’ve made deliberate efforts to design games to further social good. Last week I sat down with Samuel Liberty, a prolific game designer and lecturer for Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media, and Design. Liberty also works with the Engagement Lab at Emerson College and is the co-founder of a games-for-impact consultancy named Extra Ludic, designing games for social good, civic action, and humanitarian change around the world.
According to Liberty, any game that is designed to achieve a real-world aim is a social impact game. “Whether it be benevolent or nefarious, purposeful or unintentional, when the medium is used to create an impact on the outside world beyond the scope of the game, it becomes a social impact game.” Since games are rule-based systems that often have a representational layer (where objects or players in the game have a one-to-one correspondence to something in the real world), it’s difficult to make a game without making some sort of political or social statement.
For example, let’s consider a hypothetical game design issue: Consider a game where two teams aim to get the most points in 30 minutes and to get a point, members of one team must eliminate a player from the opposite team (colloquially known as team deathmatch). If both teams consist of human characters, the point system implies an egalitarian view of all the human characters (meaning that the elimination of each human character confers the same value, or 1 point, for the opposing team). Now, if we replace one team’s characters with gophers and keep everything else consistent, then eliminating a gopher character would be worth the same amount of points as eliminating a human character, making a subtle political statement about how gophers are in equity with mankind. Bow down to our new gopher overlords. “The fact that most people don’t realize they’re making a political statement is irrelevant and if you think that your position is politically or socially neutral, it just shows naivety,” Liberty said.
So how can game designers use value-based systems to advance social good? Liberty described three types of games for social impact: Social awareness games, social action games, and social engagement games.
Social awareness games are generally the most popular and exist by intentionally using game mechanics and dramatic elements to present political and social issues to the player. Social awareness games usually place the player in the position of a person either witnessing, perpetrating, or suffering from social ills, requiring them to learn about the social system that is causing the problem through play and decision making. An admittedly unusual example is a game like Gone Home that seeks to create awareness about LGBTQ rights and alter perceptions about persons in openly gay relationships. When done correctly, they are incredibly effective at fostering empathy for the victims of social issues.
Social action games are similar to social awareness games, but incite a call to action immediately after, and sometimes during, the experience. Calls to action might include donations, volunteering, or even calling a Congressional representative. Darfur is Dying is a popular example, and exists to create awareness about the militaristic and religious genocides plaguing the Darfur region of Sudan. Afterwards, the game reduces the barrier to action by providing links to donations pages, websites for local politicians, and even instructions on how to send letters to the President of the United States requesting international policy change.
Finally, social engagement games blur the line between games and reality, where an in-game action is also a real-world action. For example, Community PlanIt is a game aimed at increasing civic engagement in city planning by having players compete in timed challenges. Challenges might ask players to put pins on a map to show where they get groceries, poll them for thoughts on improving public transportation, or ask players to read about a problem such as soil erosion. When these challenges are completed, players are awarded coins which they can pledge to projects or causes in the community who, as a result, receive real-world funding. It also allows players to see each other’s responses, opening interesting conversations in its “Soap Box” forum. A game like Community PlanIt succeeds in increasing engagement among people who would not normally sit in a town hall meeting or engage in town planning surveys, and keeps people involved by turning a traditionally mundane civic experience into a game.
However, using a game to create social impact isn’t always the best choice. Depending on the issues and solutions needed, other mediums of awareness, action, or engagement may be more appropriate. Since games create obstacles and artificial barriers via mechanical complexity, many causes are reluctant to employ games for social good. Additionally, other institutions are put of by games because they are playful, which some see as making light of a serious situation. But, as games continue to foster empathy and drive social learning, it should be considered as another tool for those seeking to push social change throughout the globe.
If you’re interested in reading more from Samuel Liberty, you can find more on his Medium account here:
If you’re interested in the games listed above, you can find links to their webpages here:
