Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.
The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.
I haven't had a chance to share my impressions of this year's Game Developers Conference, now a month past, mostly because I've been so busy. However, a couple recent articles cover issues that came up during the third Serious Games Summit at the GDC. The Nation just ran a piece on Playstations for Peace, including a mention of Gonzalo's Newsgaming.com and Water Cooler Games. And Personal Democracy ran a story on Political Sims that mentions the Summit, Persuasive Games, and a host of other things, including the new US Budget Game I've been working on with Dave Rejeski, Ben Sawyer, and Mike Gesner. But the majority of the article focuses on Break Away Games forthcoming title A Force More Powerful, which I want to talk about today.
A Force More Powerful (AFMP) was commissioned by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict. The game is intended to demonstrate non-violent democratic revolution and will be distributed to activist groups in countries pushing for democratic change.
Break Away is a great group of developers whom I respect and admire (and not just for sponsoring the Serious Games GDC reception). But I'm worried about this game, and I'm worried about it because I'm not convinced it's ready to be put in the hands of potential revolutionaries. Don't get me wrong, this kind of openly biased game is exactly the kind of thing we've been calling for. But AFMP attempts to build a procedural model for any kind of democratic revolution. I fear that in our excitement about the game at GDC and in other forums, we've failed to ask hard questions about the political context for such an effort. As I said in the Personal Democracy article: "Is it possible to create a generalized representation of political overthrow? Can the computational representation of regime change overcome the geopolitical interests of the West?" What portion of revolutions can escape historical, cultural, and regional specificity enough to be computationally modeled?
Compare AFMP to Peacemaker, a smaller game in progress shown during the GDC poster sessions by a group of CMU ETC students. Peacemaker specifically deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an attempt to abstract the systems at work in that particular conflict, like settlements and military occupation. The game's not ready yet, but the students put on a good show with their demo. It's a much narrower representation, but Peacemaker also wears its particular progressive, if optimistic, politics on its sleeve. The creators are using the game to express that frame and invite their players to consider it.
Lead designer on AFMP Ananda Gupta points out that "If somebody sets up a scenario or represents a regime in a certain way, that format can be debated and reviewed, then played out." This is a good point. But I want to underscore the importance of also asking questions and making challenges about the ideological frame of games themselves, not just the possible frames they might afford for their players. AFMP can be located squarely in the pocket of Western interests. And even if Democracy might be good for people living under authoritarian regimes, hopefully our last two years in Iraq have taught us to think critically about such interventions. I'm hopeful that we'll see games about that topic soon.
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