Is multiplayer the key to engaging serious games?

Last was week the Games for Change festival where designers of serious games got together to discuss their nascent industry. One regular topic for discussion at such gathering is whether serious games need to be fun and what fun even means. Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer summarizes the discussion:

Perhaps games, and the audience for games, would be better served by design that emphasizes values beyond fun, but it’s clearly a difficult assignment. A notable undercurrent at this year’s festival was a sense that the current crop of games for change aren’t reaching their intended audiences. Most of these games are perceived by players as preachy, and even their developers admit they often fail to match the engaging gameplay offered by commercial games.

He also casts doubt on the idea that a new generation that grew up on games would be more inclined to take games seriously given his experience with some freshmen regarding his class on video games. That said, Abbott found hope in the increasing awareness of the value of connections with commercial developers. From my experience with documentary films, I do think production values definitely matter. This doesn’t mean that serious games should be high budget, that’s impractical, but they should have a professional look.

On the fun breakdown, I’m inclined to think engaging is a better word. To find an audience beyond the equivalent of textbooks and corporate training videos people have to want to play serious games.

Making serious games engaging gets to the mention of multiplayer in my title. Economics and political science both heavily involve themselves in game theory with the classic example being the prisoner’s dilemma. The mechanics there are not particularly impressive, cooperate or betray, but I recall little grumbling when people paired up to experiment with it. I think that’s because the challenge and competition of playing with another person can up the engagement value substantially. This could even be faked I suspect, but probably only for one-off games.

Comments

[Todd Harper]

The usefulness of "fun" as a rubric for gaming engagement is actually a quite old debate, relatively speaking, in game studies... it surprises me to hear that a conference that has Ian Bogost and Eric Zimmerman on their advisory board is doing the debating on it at all. I personally believe (and frankly, most game studies scholars I can think of do also) that semantically and philosophically, "fun" is pointless. Its subjectivity makes it far too difficult to draw a border around. I think "engagement" as a construct, as you said, is a far better starting point, certainly. An MMO player who grinds mindlessly for money to buy a piece of powerful gear probably isn't having "fun" but s/he is engaged or invested.

Mia has argued in class and discussions on the subject a few times that we might be better off ditching the "serious" label altogether and I'm inclined to agree with her, since all it currently does is set apart games of an ideological or educational bent. Why do we do that? In a weird way I believe it's because of one critical social problem with digital games, which is that the majority of the public still view them as an activity for children thanks to the word "game." So if you want a lot of things important to getting your game MADE -- funding, backing by organizations (particularly government) -- you have to throw 'serious' up there to create distance. "Whoa there, it's not just kid stuff, these games have a purpose!" And of course, like anything described as good for you, the intended audience processes "serious" as "dull" and runs for the hills. The fact that a number of serious games are pretty damn dull isn't helping either.

Part of me wonders if we shouldn't just stop trying to make this class of games that teach/persuade, and start trying to make the games we have now be more... I don't know. Responsible? Ideological? Something. As it is now we're trapped in this weird state where we're producing "lessons that look like video games" and that's... not actually terribly helpful. I know a few colleagues of mine think games for education is a lost cause, and that we should be focusing on making better and better (ideologically and 'service'-speaking) normal ones instead. I'm not sure which edge of that divide I come down on yet.

[Greg Sanders]

Thanks for the comment Todd.

Just got a reply today from Michael Abbott that also favored engagement, I'd picked up the term from his usage in passing in his post, although he didn't mention if it came up a better term at the conference.

As for serious games, I think such divisions can be useful, although I'm not sure that particular dividing line help. Documentaries for example are a somewhat analogous niche but have had a fair amount of innovation and some mass popularity in the last decade or so. However, it's a very rough analogy and even if it were closer your colleague might still be right.

I'm not sure what my take is either. I hope the serious games financial incubator will provide some basic research into mechanics and the like that haven't been tried in the commercial sector. If these show potential then they could be adapted into projects that have more engaging elements already present.