Last week gamesblog covered Persuasive Games' latest release Airport Insecurity, "a game about inconvenience and the tradeoffs between security and rights in American airports". I grabbed Ian Bogost, one half of the company (and one-half of the blog watercoolergames) to explain exactly what he means by "serious games".
What role does the player play in your games (figuratively, of course)?
How do you reconcile putting forward such an obvious political slant in your games? To be honest, I'm not sure what there is to reconcile. There is a long tradition of art as social commentary and I see my work — and videogames in general — as another line in that tradition. There's an unfortunate, implicit assumption that games are "apolitical," despite the very political issues that games like Grand Theft Auto, Deus Ex, Fable, Shadow of the Colossus, and others raise. I'm just drawing explicit attention to games as political speech in the hopes of evolving the medium.
How is it possible to make a game without an ideology? It's not possible. All games are biased. Ted Nelson made this observation as early as the mid-70s, as did Chris Crawford. Games represent part of how things work in the world, and there is no way to escape a worldview when one is designing a game. Incidentally, this goes for so-called "scientific simulations" too... they all assume something about the world, and that's a characteristic of ideology. For a few years now I've been using examples from "first responder" training for terrorist threats. All these simulations make implicit assumptions about the value of life, the unquestioned place of America in the world, and other issues worth challenging.
Do the powers that be (those that give you pay checks) view what you make for them as games or as something different? We do both commissioned games and non-commissioned (independent) games. When we do get a commission, we're very insistent about the medium. We make games, not "interactive experiences" or some watered-down euphemism that might make the funders more comfortable. It is absolutely crucial that we expand the notion of "videogames" so that it means more than three genres of fantasy violence. I take this task very seriously and I try to do my part, however small it might be.
How far do you think you can push the persuasive message (from whatever ideological starting point) before someone steps in and stops it? In the USA today, videogames have certainly been vilified, by a few high-profile political figures in particular. When we release games that are so explicitly about political issues, we always expect to see some pushback. I think we've actually experienced less than we expected. I think that the medium is still not taken as seriously as we'd like to think it is, even despite the negative attention from Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman and others. We need more explicit political speech in games to shake things up. We need to convince the world that this is a real medium, not merely a child's plaything.
What do you think other games teach players? (as food for thought, how about The Sims, GTA: Vice City, Madden and Burnout: Revenge) This question traces a broader issue in games today: we need more, and better, game criticism. I'm not talking about better journalism, although that would help too. I mean criticism like we have literary criticism and art criticism and film criticism. Work that contextualizes games in the broader sweep of human culture. I try to do this in my new book; I read The Sims alongside Baudelaire and Charles Bukowski and Grand Theft Auto alongside Madame Bovary. For example, one thing The Sims (and here I'm thinking of Hot Date especially) draws attention to is the logic of courtship. We may not realize it, but the idea of meeting a potential mate in an urban, public space is one with a 150 year history. So, I think one thing The Sims is teaching us is to interrogate and possibly question our received notions of the modern chance encounter. In The Sims, we're forced to work within the constraints of modern, mechanized courtship, and being immersed inside that constraint really challenges the player to think about their comfort with it. What does it mean to have a "meaningful" relationship today? This is just one simple example, but the opportunities to read games more closely is almost unlimited.
Where do you think the advertisers are going with their product placement in games? Advertisers are primarily interested in creating new media buying channels that look like traditional media channels — that means finding ways to sell ad "units" inside games. I think this is going to be disastrous for games and also detrimental for advertisers. But the advertisers persist, and we can expect to see more branded walls and objects in games. I think we'll also see more of those forgettable branded games that have been so popular over the last 5-7 years; they're usually clones of popular puzzle games with foodstuffs or brand symbols replacing the playing pieces. This is unfortunate too, because games have a great power to represent the way products and services work, and how consumers can interact with them intelligently. I'm trying my best to beat that drum, but it's a hard sell.
