Pushing Forward

Swain hopes The Redistricting Game, which launched at the recent Games for Change Festival in New York, is one of the success stories that helps push the genre forward.

Such a notion may seem a bit pie in the sky, especially considering The Redistricting Game’s content. According to a press release that preceded the game’s launch, “the game exposes how redistricting works, how it is abused and how it adversely affects democracy. It provides hands-on understanding of the real redistricting process, including drawing district maps and interacting with party bosses, congresspeople, citizen groups and courts. Players directly experience how crafty manipulations of lines can yield skewed victories for either party—effectively allowing politicians to choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians.”

Why did Swain make a game about gerrymandering, and why would anyone want to play it? Telling someone how redistricting works and what it means can be cumbersome and hard to grasp, Swain replies. “However, if she could gain an understanding of redistricting by experiencing it via a fact-based interactive system, then she may come to her own conclusions about its ramifications.

“Our goal with The Redistricting Game is to provide an objective look at the phenomenon and let people come to their own conclusions,” he adds. “We don’t side with one political party and we don’t push an agenda. We just want the game to demystify redistricting in a credible way and we want people to have a good time while playing it.”

Another game that hopes to demystify complex issues, impact society and promote change is PeaceMaker, released by Pittsburgh-based ImpactGames in 2006. Started by Eric Brown and Asi Burak while they were students at Carnegie Mellon University, PeaceMaker allows users to play the part of an Israeli prime minister or a Palestinian president and make diplomatic, security and economic decisions for their virtual country of choice.

Although Brown and Burak hoped their game would make an impression on the general public, they also hoped it would influence their peers in the mainstream game development community. “We really wanted to drive the industry,” says Brown, the founder and former co-manager of Issue Design Build in Seattle. “We wanted to make something that compares to the role documentaries play in the movie industry.”

“The demographic of gamers historically is 12- to 18-year-old boys,” he adds, “which has grown as that generation got older. In our minds, there is a group within that community that is interested in something with a bit more meaning, a little more depth. We wanted to show them you can produce a game that is just as engaging as anything out there, but also has a positive message and influence.”

Brown says he and Burak chose to make a video game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because “games are really good at putting people in the shoes of someone else—something you can’t always do with something like a news article. Games can empower people to interact with an environment, and they can contextualize events in time.”

Seggerman agrees. “Games can help people put themselves in perspectives otherwise unavailable to them. They can let people exhibit behaviors or try roles they’ve never tried before.”

Likewise, she says, “games are fantastic at allowing players to explore complex, interrelated issues and fiddle with those issues to see how they affect each other.” Global conflicts and even environmental issues are especially worthwhile topics for serious games, Seggerman adds, “because you can’t really look at one aspect of global warming, for instance, without looking at a myriad of other aspects.”