Julian Dibbell, writer for the Village Voice, Terra Nova and others, is aghast and distressed at the finalists showcased at MTV's new university-directed broadband initiative mtvU, submitted in response to the challenge posed by darfurisdying.com. The competition called for designers to create a politically-slanted casual game to bring awareness of the genocide that's destroying the Darfur region of Sudan. The results, as Dibbell points out, are appalling.
Fetching Water casts the player as a cute Darfuri child dodging heavily armed militia gangs through the five kilometers of desert between home and the nearest well. Fail to outrun the militiamen and the game ends, with "kidnap, rape, and murder" listed as your likeliest fates; make it to the well and back, and maybe your family survives another day of drought.
...
Ashanti Ambassadors, pitting Sudanese student activists against government gunmen, is a first-person shooter that doesn't let you shoot; Guidance reimagines the complexities of murderous ethnic conflict as a Tetris-like abstraction of sliding colored dots.
Dibbell contends that this is the result of a cynical attempt to cash in on college-age conscience.
...you might start to wonder which use of game violence is sicker: the game companies' exploitation of adolescent aggressive impulses in pursuit of unit sales, or MTV's exploitation of adolescent social conscience in pursuit of ad revenue. Say what you like about Grand Theft Auto or Mortal Kombat, but neither of them was ever so cruel as to delude anyone that playing a game might change the world.
I disagree that playing a game can't change the world, and am sure that the Serious Games contingent would concur. Indeed, what's the point of putting a political interactive product on the market (like newsgaming.com and Persuasive Games do), or forcing gamers to look at advertising whilst playing them? Both of these activities - and indeed the MTV contributions - attempt to raise awareness about an issue. Studies show that adverting in games works; games critics argue that kids learn behavioural patterns from games; educationalists suggest that interactive learning can foster more critical thinking.
Furthermore, the idea that such content creation for the purposes of digital activism should be ineffective undermines the profuse research conducted on online civic engagement.
Surely, therefore, the message of these games can raise awareness enough to evoke a reaction from players.
