Anytime someone says that games aren’t art, we’re up in arms burning straw effigies of Ebert. Any time someone says games are destructive, we want blood. Half of us want to pretend that games are only toys, and the other half of us devote thousands of our best thesaurus words to dissertations on the validity of our medium. We want to be taken seriously — and yet, every time we see a game that isn’t meant to be strictlyfun,we dismiss it out of hand.
Lots of gamers don’t really get Ian Bogost, and that’s fine with him. His company,Persuasive Games, isn’t designing for you. But if games are more than just toys to you — if you’re a proponent of the view that games are powerful experiences that shouldn’t be relegated to some “violent teenage emo kid” niche, and if you appreciate the possibilities in the medium of gaming beyond breast physics and the pew-pew-pew, then you’re able to’t affordnotto get him.
And by the way, in addition to being a freakin’ genius, Ian’s just all-around a completely rad guy. Hit the jump to be enlightened. Otherwise, the next time some desperate politician or mass media fathead dismisses gaming, you best sit down and shut up.
What’s the aim of Persuasive Games, and how are the games you design different from consumer games?
Persuasive Games makes games meant to influence people’s opinions. Usually that means games about social and political issues, but we’ve also done work in advertising, learning, and corporate training, among others. The primary difference between our games and traditional consumer games is that our work might be encountered in different situations from those games. For example, you might play a game about an organization’s public policy positions when you’re thinking about how to vote, or a game about workplace behavior in the context of a job. That said, not all our games are solely about work or learning … there’s a great deal of blurred boundaries. A lot of our games are snide and satirical rather than overt and pedagotical. You might think of our work as bearing some resemblance to non-fiction books or cartoons or documentary films.
What do you think makes gaming an ideal vehicle for this kind of work?
You’ve said that games don’t necessarily need to be fun — isn’t fun part of the definition of a game? If not, how do you quantify its efficacy?
Consumer designers obviously want the number one takeaway for gamers to be fun. What’s the most important thing you want players of your games to get out of the experience?
What designers have you learned the most from? Is there any designer/game that you think is a good model for the kind of work you do, and what elements make this so?
What’s your future prediction as far as the increasing permeability of the market for serious games in general?
