Documentary Games?
A friend sent me a link to a newly-established wiki on “documentary” games. Sadly, it’s still very new and there’s no definition of documentary games.
At first, I thought the concept a bit odd — perhaps because I think of documentaries as telling a nonfiction story, and I know that I should probably stay far away from trying to use games to relate a narrative. There are people like Steve Meretzky, Bob Bates, and Brian Moriarty who are really good at that.
My skills, on the other hand, focus on implementation and interaction design, and so my first take on documentary games is that the term didn’t fit this project.
But, since the term was floating around in my head without a definition to stick to, I started thinking about it.
How do you separate a documentary from a nonfiction biopic, for example? I think it’s the intent. A biopic puts plot ahead of accuracy, and focuses on a personality.
A documentary, one hopes, would put accuracy ahead of plot, and focuses on an event or on information transfer.
In that sense, a documentary game would be a subcategory of serious games. Serious games are games with a purpose other than entertainment. Documentary games, I submit, are games with a purpose of presenting factual information about an issue or event.
So I’ve decided that Melting Point is, in fact, a documentary game. It’s a game designed to teach people about global warming and the policies our society may choose to combat it.