Serious

“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.

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.

Well, I wanted to review Ian Bogost's new game Fatworld today, as it was just launched, but as it happens it runs like molasses on my 1.5GHz machine, so this will have to be more of a "first impressions" post, perhaps with a more in-depth review to follow in future.

We’re not talking terrorism, but cancer. Can playing a game provide a cure? Maybe not, but Hope Lab developed Re-Mission in an effort to improve the quality of life for teenage and young adult cancer patients, and they have the clinical data to prove the game works.

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.

Designed to introduce issues of energy management and environmental protection to schoolchildren, ElectroCity allows the player to control a New Zealand town and its surrounding landscape -- building power plants, extracting fossil fuels, trading on the energy market, and setting conservation policies. At the end of 150 turns, the player is graded on the town's size, environmental cleanliness, energy supply, and citizen satisfaction. The finished town layout can be uploaded to the ElectroCity server, to be viewed and ranked against other submitted towns.

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.

Global Conflicts: Palestine takes a very different approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from PeaceMaker; rather than casting you as one of the opposing leaders, you are a journalist, and rather than making high-level decisions, you are exploring a 3D environment meant to represent a section of Jerusalem.

Most "serious" games are, well, seriously dull -- high-minded, doubtless, but way too earnest, and often just bad games (since, you know, actual gameplay gets short shrift in favor of the message). And "The Redistricting Game" does not exactly get the pulse pounding as a name, no?

But surprise, it's actually engaging. It's a level-based game in which the challenges increase: at first, you're just redistricting for population equality, but then you try to gerrymander in favor of your party, and then you also have to deal with racial considerations (a constraint in federal law). You're facing a map of the state of Adams, with little blue dots representing Democratic voters, and little red ones Republicans, sliding district boundaries across the map.