Serious Attention

Serious games are no longer an aberration, of course. Countless examples created by the likes of Ian Bogost, Gonzalo Frasca, Paolo Pedercini, Chris Swain and more have caught the attention of the press and the public in the years since Seggerman’s first trip to GDC. They’ve also caught the attention of the mainstream game development community, though not often in a positive way.

“There’s a lot of hatred toward serious games right now,” Seggerman says, adding that the lack of love could be due to any number of reasons. “It could be because of the name or it could be because they think—and rightfully so—that many educational games have been terrible,” she adds. “Bad educational software has done us a lot of harm.”

Another knock against so-called serious games is that they simply don’t stack up to more mainstream offerings.

“Most people are less generous with their words; they’d say that most activist/political/serious games just plain suck” says Bogost, Ph.D., founding partner of Atlanta-based Persuasive Games, LLC, makers of Presidential Pong, Disaffected! and Airport Insecurity. “And that might be true, in part. The level of craft in serious games often leaves much to be desired.”

Powerful Robot Games' September 12th

Of course, mainstream titles generally garner bigger budgets than their “serious” brethren. "I think the main problem is that it is very expensive to make any kind of game," offers Frasca, co-founder of Powerful Robot Games, a Uruguay-based studio that has crafted such titles as September 12th and the Howard Dean for Iowa Game. “Political games generally do not have a financial return, and that makes it particularly hard to produce them with the same quality as commercial work.”

Swain, an assistant professor in the USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Interactive Media Division and a co-director of the school’s Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab, also cites miniscule budgets and less access to experienced talent as reasons for the discrepancy between mainstream and serious games.

That said, Swain—who designed The Redistricting Game and acted as a faculty advisor for the PlayStation3 game, fl0w—suggests “the field of political/activist games is very young. We need some success stories to prove our value because right now political games mostly grab headlines and have little real impact.”