Serious

This was produced by the government of Denmark. I mean, c'mon. It was 'developed' supposedly to raise awareness for domestic violence in said country, but it does so in a crassly exploitative manner. The "game" plays out as a series of looping video vignettes of a hot chick berating you in Danish; your only possible interaction is to, ahem, change your pitch up. Think a further watered-down Dragon's Lair meets Youtube video meets misogyny. It's as terrible as you can imagine.

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.

A few commentators sum this one up well:

"What an awful game. Slowly make arbitrary choices about contentious issues in a way that has nothing but an opaque relationship to the outcome of the game."

- Metafilter Commentator A

"What an awful game. Slowly make arbitrary choices about contentious issues in a way that has nothing but an opaque relationship to the outcome of the game.

Just like the real bailout! However, ironic statements and fun games don't always coincide."

- Metafilter Commentator B

"It's games like this that make me wonder if I should give up tracking them entirely."

- Ian Bogost

All that said, this game executes really well on style, with banjo music and over-the-top satirical writing delivering a vaguely punk take on the whole cluster-fuck. The gameplay suffers from too much simplicity and mechanical opacity. I don´t like a game to tell me "bad idea" when I make a choice to let a whole sector fail; just because my strategy goes counter to the designer´s particular ideology doesn't mean the game should overtly punish it. Or if it does, it should do so in a way that's elegant and consistent with some underlying algorithm. Mathematical feedback loops can be much more persuasive than direct textual admonishment, a lesson these guys don´t seem to have considered, or perhaps rejected in favor of an easier press-package. The game has done quite well in the regard, as a quick search will reveal.

It's worth a few minutes, but don't let it fool you into thinking that a rich, subtle, multifaceted take on the current collapse of Ponzi capitalism isn't possible. If anything, this game reinforces what Jonathan Blow said, that we need to abandon the message-as-meaning model if we´re going to fully utilize game design. That said, it's ok to load your subtext with a twisted style that tastes of delicate bias. Cases in point, Oligopoly and Raid Gaza!

In Lonely Frogs of Wisconsin, you play a female frog looking for a mate. When you start, you're assigned a frog of a particular species, and shown a bunch of different species of frogs; mousing over them, you can listen to their mating calls.

Created by PM Studios (which did ETROM: The Astral Essence, a beautiful action/adventure RPG with extremely awkward controls), Eco Warriors is a "serious" game funded by the government of Italy's Apulia region, with EU support. It's primarily in Italiano, but the English language version contains English subtitles. Ciao, Eco Warrior.

Tempest in Crescent City is the second game developed by Global Kids, a not-for-profit that provides afterschool programs to involve inner city youth in new media. Not many inner city youth are crackerjack coders, so they team up with game developers; their first game, Ayiti, was developed by GameLab, and Tempest with Game Pill (warning: annoying Flash-based site that resizes your browser whether you want to or not).

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.

The ideal global warming game, it seems to me, would be a detailed simulation of the global climate as well as the global economy -- and preferably one that would allow you to tinker with the assumptions, both at the macro and micro level. At the macro level, I'm imagining scenarios ranging from "We're all doomed!" to "Bah, the Copenhagen Consensus has it right," and at the micro allowing you to twiddle individual knobs (e.g., "nuclear power plants are safe as houses" to "they go blooey with alarming frequency").

Climate Challenge is not the ideal global warming game -- but it's surprisingly engaging.