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Last year’s game design challenge was to design a game that would win the Nobel Peace prize. This question was also posed on the WolverineSoft email list before GDC, which shows that a lot of people are interested in the question. It’s a tough question. It’s easy to make a game built around violence, just look at, well… pretty much every videogame out there, if we take the broadest sense of “violence”. It’s an exaggeration, I know; and I’ve spent a lot of time arguing against it elsewhere, but as an (over)generalization it holds up pretty well. In most games (sports, racing, simulation, and puzzle genres excluded), the solutions to your problems are to punch, kick, slash, shoot, stomp and/or explode everything in your way. But in how many games do you end your conflicts by talking, disarming, or negotiating? Few people would think of these actions as exciting, and building compelling game mechanics around them is even more difficult. Yes… life is hard for the pacifist gamers out there—luckily, most of us are able to tell the difference between fantasy fiction and reality.

The biggest argument against a game winning the Nobel Peace Prize, is that games have very little or no effect on the real world. At their core, they are just entertainment presented on a TV screen, a monitor, or a handheld device. They are barely, if at all, able to change the people who play them, so what chance do they have to change the world? In fact, it goes against most gamers’ arguments that videogames don’t affect their players’ behavior. If a violent videogame can’t make its player violent, how could a peaceful videogame ever hope to make its players more peaceful?

There is one particular style of game that stands more of a chance of affecting real life. The characters are played by real people in real-world environments, but the narrative and other elements are often fictional. No, not LARPers; I’m talking about Big Games. These are things as simple as a game of tag taking place over a large number of city blocks (possibly with the aid of GPS locating devices), or as complex as i love bees. These types of games are unique because they involve real human beings interacting directly with other human beings. Okay… maybe that’s not so unique, as anyone who has played tag, charades, mafia, or any number of board games could tell you. Perhaps the difference is that Big Games also involve interacting with real environments, and often draw people who are not playing the game into these interactions. One recent example, Cruel 2B Kind, a game in which players attempt to assassinate each other with an arsenal of complements and in the process cause massive “collateral damage” to the surrounding civilian populace, is a step in the right direction.

So, how can we use this type of game to create world peace? We need to know where we are going before we can get there, so we need to figure out what “peace” is in the first place. And that’s a topic for another day…

(Check back tomorrow for the answer…)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 2:27 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.