1. Quiz games are dull; 2. politically-obsessed people whining about whatever it is that drives them up a tree are highly annoying; 3. user-created content mostly sucks; and 4. preaching to the choir is highly ineffective at bring about social change. Therefore, let us do a game-for-change that is quiz-based, using user-created content, with questions based on social issues that preaches to the choir!
Um, no, let's try that again.
1. Games will change the world; 2. crowd-sourcing will change the world; 3. the world needs to be changed for the better, that is, in accordance with our own political beliefs, and 4. the Internet is the way to change the world. Therefore we will do a game on the Internet with crowd-sourcing that will educate people about social issues.
Brain Seeds is a quiz game with 40 questions each week. You can join and submit your own questions about political issues you care about! And you can play through the game and see the political questions! Two players every week get a free prize! Is that cool or what?
There is, thankfully, at least an editorial filter; the developers select the 40 weekly questions from among those submitted, so we won't be served ones asking about penises. But we still get questions like this one:
"What are statewide laws that provide state-level spousal rights to same-sex couples similar to, but not equal to, marriage?"
The answer to this is answer B, "domestic partnership laws or civil union laws," not answer C, "domestic union laws or civil partnership laws."
Fascinating, huh? And no doubt knowing this will bring about social change.
Quiz, or trivia, games work only in a competitive environment. It's mildly fun to show off how much you know to others, and to see what obscure things your friends know. They are consequently better suited for tabletop play (or for a bunch of people around the screen, ala You Don't Know Jack), but can work -- not as well, but work -- in an online environment with a leaderboard and/or social networking brag messaging. Brain Stem has a leaderboard and a "competitive mode," but...
Each question has a link that takes you to a website where you can find the answer to the question. So there is an "educational" element, no doubt one of the developers' objectives. There is not, however, any in-game education about the right answer, which would have been trivial to implement and possibly effective, if "effective" is the right word here.
But this essentially makes the competitive aspect of the game irrelevant, particularly since you can play in "practice" mode and see all this week's questions before you play in "competitive" mode, knowing the answer to all your questions. In competitive mode timing affects your score, so the way to hit the top of the leaderboard is to have the fastest net connection so the Flash app loads the next question quickest.
In other words, even if you try to take this seriously as a trivia game, it subverts itself.
In toto, Brain Seeds is a dull quiz game with dull questions that reek of the sententious pomposity to which politicals of both left and right are prone. It fails at any of the objectives it sets for itself -- neither a good game nor effective as an instrument of social change.
Mannn...
You're a real downer sometimes, you know that?
(Not that it isn't important to critique this stuff.)
Critique of the review & how we used it to improve Brain Seed
[FULL DISCLOSURE - I'm one of the Brain Seeds developers]
CRITIQUE
The reviewer mentions that the "competitive aspect of the game [is] irrelevant" because the competition will ultimately boil down to who has the fastest internet connection which is not true. All of the questions are preloaded before the competitive quiz starts so the quality of your net connection will have little impact on your score. To discredit the entire competitive aspect of the game merely because it takes place over the internet is unfair because it assumes there is no skill in actually learning and quickly recalling the answers.
Based on the way the review was written, the reviewer, like many others both inside and outside the game industry, seems to believe that creating social change through games is an all or nothing proposition. Either your game creates some major impactful change in the player or your game has no effect what so ever. We believe the truth lies somewhere in between those two extremes. We understand that Brain Seeds is not going turn players into social activist alone. However we do believe that by exposing players to new facts and social issues and making their retention beneficial, players will take away something from playing even if it's the fact that there are estimated to be 27 million men, women and children enslaved today.
How the review helped Brain Seeds become better
One of the major changes we made to Brain Seeds was to randomize the question selection during both the Free Play(answer all the questions you want) and Prize(answer 15 questions for official score) Games.
Players certainly have the ability to write down the correct answer to each question before taking the Prize Game. However since there are over 300 possible questions so far and the number will only go up, players who want to write down the correct answers and compile an "Answer Guide" will have their work cut out for them. "Answer Guide" players will also have an extremely hard time scoring competitively because it will take them longer to find the answer in the 300+ question guide than it would be to actually learn the right answer and recall it from memory. To score competitively, players will have to become proficient at looking through the question's source link to find the correct answer, similar to a website scavenger hunt. To become one of the top scorers though, players will have to become familar with a large portion of the question set so they don't have to look at the source link because they've already learned the answer.
If a player goes through the trouble of creating an Answer Guide and they've just been exposed to 300+ questions, there's a good chance that they actually learned something during the process.
If a player decides that the best way to win is to quickly search through each question's source link andy they've just read through 15 different websites, there's a good chance they've learned something.
If a player decides that the best way to win is to learn the answer to as many questions as possible, then there's a good chance that they have learned something.
Admittedly, it is hard to accurately quantify how much each player will actually learn by playing Brain Seeds, but we do believe that competitively playing Brain Seeds will yield a net educational benefit for players.