Games About Frontiers
Or: Why make a choose-your-own-adventure about Israel’s kibbutz movement?
Two seemingly unrelated topics have fascinated me for… well, a long time.
The first passion is games. I grew up in the 1970s as a fan of board games of all sorts. Even more than playing games, I liked designing my own games, on big sheets of coloured bristol board that my mom (a grade 2 teacher) brought home. I would draw square-filled tracks. I would cut out tokens and player pieces. And I would draft, play-test and revise elaborate rules.
In 1980, when the Winter Olympics came to Lake Placid, not far from my hometown of Ottawa, I designed a mini-board game for each of the events. (Maybe not ice dancing, but definitely bobsledding and biathlon.) My first paying job was as an after-school Dungeon Master at a neighbourhood community centre to teach younger kids how to play D&D. (My second job was selling Avon, but that’s another story…) Role Playing Games had taken over my imagination by then. Even before I’d played D&D, I’d heard about the game, and tried to design my own board-game version, which I’d misspelled “Dudgeons & Dragons”. In D&D and other RPGs, I loved the mix of arcane rules, storytelling, simulation and hours of collective imagining with a small group of fellow social misfits. (And dice. I loved the different kinds of dice.)
I also grew up in the Stone Age of early video games and arcades. We had a knock-off Pong for our TV. I played games on friends’ Atari’s and TRS-80's and repaid the favour by letting them try out games (including several text adventures) on my parents’ Apple II. I misspent much of my youth in a succession of quarters in Q*Bert and Dragon’s Lair at the local arcade.
When I was 20, I had an early mid-life crisis. (Mostly, a combination of a broken heart and severe academic ambivalence.) I dropped out of university, bought an open plane ticket to Israel and lived on a kibbutz. I’d only heard about these communal farms, on which you could get room and board in exchange for volunteer work, from a friend of a friend. I’m not Jewish. I wasn’t especially political. I just needed an escape — and Israel seemed far, far from Canada.
I planned to stay for a couple months and keep travelling. Instead, I stayed for eight — and was tempted to stay longer, when I was offered a job as kibbutz lifeguard. I travelled through the country, from the heights of Mt. Hermon (where I tobogganned) to the depths of the Red Sea (where I snorkelled). I fell in love with the Old City of Jerusalem and got stoned — literally, not figuratively — at the Dome of the Rock. (It was the height of the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising.) I had a proper adventure, in other words.
The kibbutz changed me — in ways that, 25+ years later, I’m still figuring out.
For the last five years, I have been wrestling with questions related to both games and kibbutzes. I have been thinking about the topics of play and of community — and how they’re related. Since 2009, I’ve been researching and writing (and re-researching and re-writing) a creative nonfiction manuscript — I’ve been calling it an “investigative travel memoir” — about the kibbutz movement in particular and the utopian impulse in general in Israel and Palestine. (The idea was inspired after I learned that the kibbutz where I stayed, which had been founded by Romanian Marxists, had listed the lens factory where I’d worked on the NASDAQ stock exchange.) The manuscript has changed its focus several times and even its title: Look Back to Galilee, The Shouting Fence, Who Killed the Kibbutz? and, most recently, Love & Rockets. In 2011, I gave a TEDx Talk to make sense of what I learned about community from living on a kibbutz.
For the last three years, I’ve also renewed my interest in games — and especially video games — as the Director of the Technology & Society Minor at the University of Victoria. There, I’ve co-organized the Games without Frontiers “idea arcade” to highlight the social power of video games. I helped launch a course in the History of Video Games and Interactive Media. I’ve done peer-reviewed research into the power of “gamification” tools and given many talks about the topic.
So why not combine these two research passions?
That’s what I thought when I took a course on Games for Digital Humanists course at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute last year (with the amazing Matt Bouchard and Andy Keenan) and began to mock up the ideas for a choose-your-own narrative simulation games (or “virtual experience”) that will let players explore life as a kibbutznik, over the century-long history of Israel’s communal movement, including all the ethical, political, economic and social compromises faced by kibbutz leaders during the past 100 years.
I’m calling it Kibbutz: The Settlers of Palestine. (Yes, I know my titles tend to change.) I will be collaborating with Ashley Blacquiere, a fellow instructor in the Technology & Society program and experienced game designer.
And in the interest of transparency, I will be writing about my own ups and downs as a game designer/writer/collaborator, as well as reviewing other serious games, simulations, and interactive sites that I will be playing… er, “researching” as background over the coming few months.
So, let’s Press Start and begin…
