Educational/ecological games

Notes from a session held at the Luminous Green Retreat, 29th of April 2007

Angelo Vermeulen

• Darfour is dying, http://www.darfurisdying.com/
• Darfour live role playing game, Bart was involved
• Make your own Bush speech, here
• Escape from Woomera: controversial due to its stance on detention of immigrants and its funding by the Australian government, http://escapefromwoomera.com/
• Climate Challenge, http://www.red-redemption.com/press/

• short (Flash) games: viral nature through internet distribution, disadvantage: oversimplification of the actual problems
• more complex games: most NGOs prefer this, disadvantage: should not be overdidactical
• virtual worlds (Second Life): games but also protests etc.
• physical games, extra games

Question: not everyone plays games, isn’t that a problem?

Not really, games simply address a gamer audience which is a large 'target' group

• modding as an interesting option: advantage: known game environment, disadvantage: hard to twist into a completely different experience
• Flash is not available for Linux
• Processing (programming language) offers interesting possibilities

Good educational games only come out of teams with an adequate combination of different skills: apart from educators, people with a good understanding of gameplay and game culture are also needed; they need not necessarily to be aware of the specific issues addressed in the game.

• Darfour live role playing game with different types of characters, objects and possible interactions
• even for 16 year olds, the game was rather complex
• the youngest participants never wanted to pick up the role of victim
• there was a lack of knowledge about the actual conflict
• the included book and cd-rom were too elaborate
• suggested solution: create two games, an intro game providing information, and a second game reflecting the actual complexity

• India
• video arcades with a lot of broken machines
• use these to program new games with local content
• collaborating with local programmers#

• extra games: games incorporating activities in the real world (running, GPS locations etc.)
• ecology in games: day/night cycles, animal behavior, etc. (STALKER)

• compose a TEAM with different skills, include game enthousiasts, preferably also people without knowledge of the specific problem
• decide from the onset what TYPE of game you want to make
• AESTHETICS are very important, often most of the time is taken up by content creation and visuals are rather generic
• easy LEARNING of the game mechanics, quick intro, can become more complex during the course of the game
• good REWARDING system, gratifying, could be a score but also a visual
• concise but adequate BACKGROUND information
• BUZZ (people talking about it), viral (= not necessarily the same)
• “Rules of Play”, Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman, reader on all sorts of games and gameplay