Games For Change - I Am Changed

Man did I get a dose of the NYC rat race. Up early in Stamford, catching the train, didn't sleep until well after midnight following travel to upstate CT. But it was so worth it.

- "Measuring Impact", a talk on metrics from a "for Change" point of view. Eric Zimmerman voiced the concern that certain assesment systems might constrain what kind of games get funded and made, by reinforcing institutional standards in advance of design experimentation. I'd take it a step further, and suggest that putting metrics first would reinforce a trend toward the co-opting of interactivity by governments and corporations into the ultimate form of propaganda. Bottom line: metrics can't be used as an optimization tool so much as a tool for near-optimization to local maxima that suite the "wabi sabi", or beautiful imperfection, of your particular game.

- "Funding Perspectives", a talk on how to get Foundation money, ect. I skipped this one and took a trip to Wall St. instead - no handouts please.

- At lunch, Frank Lantz claimed games aren't a medium and Karen Sideman discussed the "gaminess" of things that aren't trying to be games, as well as games that are trying to make an impact outside the game itself. It was cut short, more later.

- "Moving Markets", this was the money talk... literally. One VC suggested that NGOs and VCs are like yin and yang in the ways they change the social ecology, like how Walden wouldn't have been able to diss a technology society without the time-freeing benefits of technology. In the spirit of transcending these dialectics, the guy from EA paraphrased Chris Crawford's advice to avoid the game industry in making meaningful games and called it "unfair", then proceeded to participate in a panel calling for the kinds of games Chris Crawford has been trying to make 15 years before it became cool. I got a kick (on multiple levels) out of one VC suggesting that in the wake of Club Penguin-esque virtual worlds, the next trend would be games with meaning. On one level, that sounds great, and he's probably right. On another level it strikes me as funny, like "tighten up those graphics... and put some meaning into it." If I were a strategic angel, and I might be (the way Barack Obama is a secret Muslim), I would take it a step further: the next wave is applying game principles to applications that utilize real world data and effect agency in the real world. There is of course huge potential for closed systems that are deeply moving.

- A talk on introducing games and game development into the classroom, only caught the tail end. An example of a game where kids were involved in the collaboration was the excellent Ayiti. Regretfully I didn't get a chance to talk to the woman from Global Kids, but I'm confident that no matter how good my career is, some 12-year-old in 2012 is going to one-up me.

- Sandra Day O'connor is consulting on a court-system game designed by Jim Gee, and that's a milestone.

- Everyone leaves, except for two dozen folks. Imagine a bunch of smart, smart people, half of them half academics (net-quarter), discussing whether games evoke magical thinking anymore, or if they're a medium, if stocks are game tokens, and if games are drawing us toward a future of enlightenement and greater empathy, or Asperger's-lite. They left to go to a bar with a bunch of german board games. Game intellectuals, a Manhattan bar, and german board games, I wish I didn't have to catch train, but so it was.

I think the empathy issue is pretty important and transcends mere semantics - could games be complicit in leading us to a "Shriek" scenario? Heather Chaplin raised a concern along these lines, not in those terms of course, and Frank Lantz dismissed it as being a naive concern. I would say it's more naunced than that, there's nothing inherently a-empathetic to the medium/art-form (ahem), you have your Passages and your Gears Of War. What I want to see is a shooter where after you complete the big adventure you have to deal with growing old, and you use the fancy aiming system to find your car keys or the TV remote, and it gets harder and harder as you slip into the decaying spiral of mortality, and then when you die that's the end of the game. How much would that add to such a budget? 200k added to 10 mil? Money's not the obstacle here, it's the will and vision.

Bottom line, it's a really exciting time for games as art and games as being relevant to society, and there will be cross-pollination with the commercial industry (unlike the tragic east-coast/west-coast rivalry of rap music). However, there's a real concern that, as I predicted last summer, games will be co-opted by the establishment for their awesome power to meta-program vast populations, and that this will steer us toward an undesirable future.

Get that money.