Social Games
By Joey Ben-Hail. Filed in discussion |Tags: games, gaming
The three games I decided to play with were Ayiti: the Cost of Life, Hurricane Katrina and Oiligrachy. Also, I watched the Second Life (SL) video on child sex trafficking on Global Kids’s (GK) website http://www.olpglobalkids.org/virtual_worlds/. I found all of the games to be socially relevant in one way or another for the child or adult that decided to play them. I also found the games gave the gamer a nice spinet of the social, economic, and political implications of poverty, natural disasters, greed, etc. through play.
For example, I found the Ayiti: Cost of Life game to be extremely difficult to win as so many factors were stacked up against the Haitian family such as health, work, proper schooling, money, and last but not least, happiness, which the player truly had to learn how to ration so that the family could survive from one season to another. I feel that this type of social game teaches gamers, (child and adult alike) just how hard it is to live in a developing country and how hard one has to balance the health, work, school, money, and happiness factors in their life as well as their family’s life to sustain a somewhat decent quality of life.
Another social game that teaches (children and adults alike) social and political lessons through play is the Hurricane Katrina game. In this game the player steps up in the face of natural disaster to help their fellow man through an avatar called Vivica, a young girl who is a resident of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Through Vivica, the gamer gets a snippet of what life was like before and after Hurricane Katrina, (i.e. friends and family members separated from one another, debris flying everywhere, people stuck in their homes without electricity, running water or food). Instead of lying still while all of this is happening, Vivica goes from neighborhood to neighborhood helping out the citizens of New Orleans by delivering food and water, all the while she is looking for her mother. In a sense, a game like Hurricane Katrina empowers the child playing it by showing them that in the face of disaster, human beings can and should take care of one another.
The game Hurricane Katrina also had a not so subtle political message that unfortunately, a lot of times politics gets in the way of the right thing to do as a human being. An example of this was the newspaper headline that Vivica saw about how Cuba offered to send thousands of Doctors to New Orleans after Katrina but that the state department refused their offer because of the U.S.’s cold relations with Cuba ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also later on in the game a citizen of New Orleans refers to the same headline (when he talks to Vivica) and says that he can’t believe that the State Department refused free Doctors to come and help citizens that so richly needed them.
Oiligrachy was a social game that gave the player the tools to essentially become an oil tycoon. More specifically, in the game’s description the caption says, “Now you can be the protagonist of the petroleum era: explore and drill around the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energies and increase the oil addiction. Be sure to have fun before the resources begin to deplete.” I found this game to be dark yet comical in nature as the gamer is put in the shoes of an oil tycoon which has their oil company survey and drill land for oil, (beginning just after WWII) while learning how to create an oil addicted nation, (i.e. lining the pockets of pro oil company congress people and congress people that are on the fence about being pro oil while at the same time lobbying Congress to support pro oil addition bills).
I feel that these social games truly allow gamers to be able to identify with (or in the case of Oligarchy, unidentify with) the social, economic, and political message they try to convey, whether it be positive in a social game like Hurricane Katrina or negative in a social game like Oiligrachy. Thus, I happen to agree with the comment that Josephine made in the SL post, “…playfulness is key in questioning and exploring cultural identity… (and that) this sort of virtual exploration transfers to real-world affect.”
Lastly, I felt that the SL video on child sex trafficking on GK’s website was really well done as it gave the viewer a moral and political overview of how that horrific crime happens to children and how law enforcement has to fight these atrocious crimes with one hand tied behind their backs. That video was especially near and dear to me as my cousin is the Superintendent of the Tel Aviv Police Department and operates a unit that attempts to put these awful people in jail and he told me that unfortunately, just like in the video, charges brought out against sex traffickers don’t always stick.
Monday, August 2nd 2010 at 8:40 pm |
Joey, your reflections on your gaming experience are definitely interesting. I also was intrigued by Josephine’s comment regarding gaming ( “…playfulness is key in questioning and exploring cultural identity… (and that) this sort of virtual exploration transfers to real-world affect.”). It’s interesting to see how gaming has progressed over the years, and the cultural influence that it can have on the players. I think it’s easy for people to write off gaming as a mind-less experience and allow certain gaming stereotypes to influence their thoughts on gaming in general. However, it is clear just from reading about your gaming experiences that gaming is far from mind-less. I’m interested to see how gaming is incorporated into learning environments more in the future, and how it evolves overall.
Monday, August 2nd 2010 at 10:13 pm |
Hey Joey,
I played Ayiti:The Cost of Life today and I have got to say that it was quite depressing. I felt so helpless, it just made me mad. There were so many external factors that I could not control (hurricanes, floods, cholera and so on…) that it became impossible to help.
I did very much like the incorporation of the different factors such as happiness, education and health that had an influence on the family’s life.
It reminded me of an economics class that I took in high school about the value of the GPD (Gross Domestic Product) of a country vs the Human Development Index of a nation (HDI). Basically, the HDI unveils how countries are doing in terms of education and health which are fundamental factors in human development. It becomes noteworthy, when the GDP is high but the HDI is very low. Check out the following website to look at the contrast between the two figures for each country : http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/data/hdi_gdp/
If you select Senegal, you will notice that their HDI doesn’t live up to their GPD. However, Eritrea has a much higher HDI compared to its GDP.
As a very general conclusion, it seems that it is not about how much money nations have but rather how the people in power decide to spend it!
Wednesday, August 4th 2010 at 1:33 am |
I played Ayiti: the Cost of Life and Hurricane Katrina today. I also found Ayiti to be a bit depressing, but I felt I learned more from Ayiti then from Hurricane Katrina. The graphics were nice in both of them, and I think that is really important for these types of games….they need to appeal to a younger generation that is familiar with playing lots of games. With that said, I also find it hard to place myself in a kid’s shoes to see how these games might be effective for them. For me, I connected less with Hurricane Katrina. I did not feel the seriousness of the subject matter at hand when I was playing the game, and kind of just felt like a was playing a game….unlike Ayiti, where I had to think and react more.
Thursday, August 5th 2010 at 4:39 pm |
I played Ayiti: Cost of Life first. I have to say it’s not much of a game. There is no player choice. You have no opportunity to decide your fate. Perhaps that is the point of the game, but then it is not a game. Play is when you are given freedom to make decisions that are known to have little danger (at least until you get to extreme sports, but you still have to decide whether to leap off the base tower or not). There is no playing involved here, because there is no opportunity to make a decision. I played the game 3 times, each time starting with a different strategy. Every time I started the game, the message popped up that there was a celebration. The only button says “continue”. The next screen tells me I’ve spent all the money. WTH? I didn’t choose to do that! I decode this as the game designers telling me that Haitians will spend all their money on partying, every time. If this was a game, then I’d have the choice of whether to spend money or not. And in every game of Ayiti I played, the husband and wife die of cholera half way through year two. Why didn’t they go to a NGO clinic? Where is the free will in this “game”? And the quiz at the end does nothing. It doesn’t give me any feedback. It just goes back to the start screen. The only thing I learned from this “game” was that apparently Haitians are unwise with money and ignore bloody diarrhea. I think that used as part of an integrated lesson plan, this could be a useful teaching tools for elementary age kids. But for me as an adult, I found it rather, frustrating. Again, perhaps this well illustrated the frustration of being in that situation in Haiti. However, the game offered (when I played) no opportunities to make choices that might impact that situation. Yes, you can’t choose when, where, or what disasters occur. But you can try to make choices that offset the future uncertainty (if free will exists, which this game seems to proffer that it does not).
I also watched the Consent SL game video on Global Kids site. Watching a video is of course a different experience than playing the game. But this game did involve making choices. And I would qualify it as “play” because players are free to make choices with little actual concern for outcomes. I had a very different reaction to this game vs. Ayiti. I learned quite a bit. I was aware from PBS docu’s about prison human experimentation. However, I didn’t know that Parole Boards were involved. The player in this game had choices to make, choices that real people had made before. For them, it was not play. The consequences are/were very real. And laws and practices have changed. This points out the possibility to use games to play, to make choices that don’t impact a person immediate situation in order to have an impact on choices in real situations that have deep impacts on individuals and society.
When I try to play Tempest in Crescent City, Firefox informs me that, ” Reported Attack Page!
This web page at tempestincrescentcity.ning.com has been reported as an attack page and has been blocked based on your security preferences.
Attack pages try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attack others, or damage your system.
Some attack pages intentionally distribute harmful software, but many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners.”
So I skipped that game unfortunately, as I’m from Louisiana and wanted to play that game.
Thursday, August 5th 2010 at 4:45 pm |
So I just tried to play Ayiti again. Same exact thing. Except I made a mistake in my previous description. The button on the Karnival/Easter screen that I got every time I played says “celebrate” not “continue”. There is no “don’t celebrate” or “celebrate moderately”. And both parents were dead of cholera in less than one year this time.
No free will.