Alternative Topics

Headline-grabbing subjects like global warming or third-world poverty (as seen in the popular Ayiti: The Cost of Life) aren’t the only ones tackled in serious games. Some of the genre’s most captivating offerings take on topics that are a bit further from the limelight.

Take Persuasive Games’ Disaffected!, which puts players “in the role of employees forced to service customers under the particular incompetences common to a Kinko’s store.” Bogost says he made the game because “Kinko’s is a place I both frequent and abhor and I felt that a satire of it had the opportunity to speak to a whole range of people.”

“Getting crappy service at Kinko’s is a mundane, everyday experience that all of us have had,” he adds. “Why does it happen? We don’t answer that question in the game, but we offer players the chance to step behind the counter and imagine what forces might be driving these dissatisfied workers. Is it simple incompetence? Sedition? Labor issues?”

Similar questions are addressed in another of Persuasive Games’ offerings: Airport Insecurity. “It’s another everyday experience that I hoped players could start to ask questions about,” Bogost says. “I’m really much more interested in the mundane than the serious. It’s just that our work often breaks a lot of unspoken rules about what can be represented in a video game.”

The same can be said for the products of the Italian video game collective La Molleindustria, headed up by Paolo Pedercini. One of studio’s best-known releases is The McDonald’s Video Game, which puts players behind the counter (and into the back office) of the world’s most famous (and infamous) fast-food chain. The lesser-known Tamatipico, on the other hand, focuses on the often-ignored world of flexworkers, while another La Molleindustria offering, Queer Power: Welcome to Queerland, turns a curious eye toward “queer theory.”

“I see a lot of cartoons and movies that deal with gender issues, but video games too often spread homophobic messages,” Pedercini says of the thought process behind Queer Power, which inverts the fighting game archetypes created by arcade-style beat ‘em ups like Capcom’s seminal Street Fighter II.

“Game conventions are strongly biased by cultural and ideological values,” the developer says. Overturning those clichés “is a way to play with players’ expectations and push them to reflect on the stereotypes in commercial games.”

Offering gamers “alternative points of view” is a goal Pedercini and his crew set for each of La Molleindustria’s releases. “We believe that if we want to have an impact on society we must influence mainstream pop culture,” Pedercini says. “The progressive forces always ignore the importance of pop culture in the opinion-making process.” Conservatives, he adds, have the practice down pat. “Just look at TV shows like Dallas.”

Who Needs Fun?

Play a few rounds of Queer Power and you’ll quickly realize that “having fun” isn’t the point. Nor is it the point of any of Pedercini’s games, it seems. "Fun is never our main
goal-or, at least, not the common concept of fun," he says.

Other developers of serious games share Pedercini’s opinion that video games don’t have to be fun to be worthwhile. “I’m all for escapism,” Frasca says, “but I think that games that deal with serious topics can be more engaging to certain people.”

“For 30 years now we’ve focused on making games produce fun,” adds Bogost. “Isn’t it about time we started working toward other kinds of emotional responses?”

Bogost believes that will happen eventually. “I know that comparisons to the film industry have grown tired and overused,” he says, “but indulge me in this one: When you watch the Academy Awards this year, how many films in the running for awards are about big explosions and other forms of immediate gratification, and how many are about the more complex subtleties of human experience?

“Someday, hopefully someday soon, we'll look back at video games and laugh at how unsophisticated we are today,” Bogost adds. “It's like going to the cineplex and every screen is showing a Michael Bay flick.”

Seggerman offers up a similar comparison to the movie industry when forecasting the future of the serious games movement. “It took a while for film to start taking a look at serious issues,” she says. “We didn’t see documentaries come to the fore until the late 60s or early 70s. So it’s going to be a little while before serious games hit their stride and gain mainstream attention.

“It will get there,” Seggerman adds. “It has to—it’s such a natural fit.”