Games for Change

Real Lives 2010 is an updated version of a game that has been around for several years. For those familiar with the older edition, the main differences are considerably superior graphics (including algorithmically generated 3D faces for your characters) and aspects of the game that pull in information from web sources such as Google Maps at times.

Homeland Guantanamo is a Flash "game for change" dramatizing the iniquities of the American system of immigrant detention. This system is indeed iniquitous -- no proper judicial oversight, no mechanism for appeal outside of the system itself, and based on the a priori assumption of guilt, a notion contrary to Anglo-American common law on which our justice system is supposedly based. Or to put it another way, I am in complete agreement with the premises of the game, so my criticisms of it should be understood not as an attack on its politics, but on its merits as a game qua game, as well as its effectiveness as an instrument of persuasion.

Layoff is developed by Tiltfactor Laboratory, which is run by Dr. Mary Flanagan, a well-regarded game studies academic, with funding from the NSF. Flanagan also runs Values at Play, which is devoted to studying how games are or can be expressive of social values.

Given these impressive facts, how interesting or successful is Layoff?

He's done it again, Paolo Pedercini has made a fun, polished, punk-positive satire, but this time instead of focusing on a particular industry or scandal, he's taking a broad-view of a world economy driven and chained by oil. In Oiligarchy you play the CEO of an international oil company, drilling your way to riches and dominance. I've been looking forward to this game since Paolo mentioned it to me at Games for Change in June, he told me "the better you are at the game, the worse you'll do."

When is an art game not an art game? We link to lots of art games, you know -- things like Jason Rohrer's Passage or the work of Messhof or Petri Purho, and it's a diverse lot -- but they all have one thing in common. These artists have high regard for the medium of the game, and they are attempting to create something novel and interesting with due respect for what games can do and how they achieve their effects. They have chosen to work their art within the medium of the game, because they love games.

Budget Hero is a game about the US Federal budget. In the game, you raise and lower the budget by cutting or funding particular programs (in the form of cards), and your aim is to reach a budget that matches your values. For instance, if you tell it that you value education, and spend a lot of money on education, you're self-consistent enough to get the education badge.

“Serious” games usually have to balance between being “educational” and being “fun”. Third World Farmer presents itself as a greatly educational game, promising to teach the player the hardships of maintaining a family in a world full of corruption, war and diseases. But once played, it turns out that it’s fairly easy to be successful. And that’s exactly why this game is actually pretty fun for an “educational” game.

From the moment ICED starts up, you know we're in trouble. You see, ICED (which stands for "I Can End Deportation") is a "game for change," in this case one that advocates for reform of immigration policy, its stance being pro-immigrant. During the initial loading screen, voice-over and scrolling text tells us "No one is safe from deportation--the sick and elderly, pregnant women, families..." And so on.

In Against All Odds, you play a citizen of a repressive country who is (in the first of twelve acts) detained by the police and forced to flee. The first four deal with escaping from your country, the next four with trying to establish refugee status in a host country, and the final four with attempting to adjust to life in a strange land. It was developed under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

Cost Of Life is one of the best political web games released in 2006, right up there with The McGame and the comic genuis of Airport Security. Unlike most games with a political message, like September 12th, or 3rd World Farmer, CoL has a strategy that works buried in a heap of faulty (and revealingly so) tactical blunders. This is most telling in the balance of the game's stochastic elements, where health risks can be marginalized and hurricane disasters are actually quite rare, unlike 3rd World Farmer's frustratingly even spread that ensured you'd lose everything every few turns.