Finally, some real competition
Damn, Skippy. This post was a double surprise.
First, I hadn’t seen the news about the BBC game about global warming yet. It’s better than I thought it would be at first glance, but it’s also kind of predictable, and I found the gameplay to be fairly stilted. Although it seemed like they had the elements to make a game that could be fun, it felt rather scripted and uninteresting.
(The Sgt. Pepper-style 
look and feel doesn’t do it for me either, but that’s a matter of taste and I won’t presume to criticize it — I just don’t like it.)
It’s an interesting existence proof of a global warming game. And it scares the living shit out of me because that’s not what I’ve wanted to create.
Which is why I’ve been slashing at my game design for the last month or so trying to cut it down to the bare minimum. My initial design is a deep and detailed planetary sim, complete with lots of data and education about it, but without the artifacts of the “cards” this game uses. But as I’ve been implementing the prototypes, my BORING alert has been going off. I’ve been hoping that it’s a matter of game design and implementation — that I can polish in the fun — but I am growing more and more skeptical of that approach.
So I sat down one day and started designing the Global Warming Game for Museums. Given a classroom of kids in a room in a museum, what kind of interactive experience would they want to play?
And another time I wrote down a design for a card game. What if you didn’t have a computer? How would you play a game that teaches you something about global warming while you had fun?
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a Flash game, in the same genre as the BBC one. What if you only wanted to play, in a web browser, for a few minutes? How would that sort of gameplay work out?
I think I have something. . It’s got some of the same elements as the BBC game but a faster style of gameplay, and it trusts you more to to be able to process the implications of the decisions you make. The worry, of course, is that it’s too much of a “gamer’s” game design, which might be bad for my target market. So I will probably work on making things more obvious — but I’d like to avoid the preachiness of the BBC game.
Which brings me to the second surprise of Nabeel’s post. Nabeel is a Boston-area entrepreneur whom I met last fall. I guess I’d say we’re more than Friendsters but not quite friends. His post fairly accuses most serious games of preaching to the choir. I’m not sure if I’m included in the group of people whose “chest-thumping earnestness” turns him off. I will confess that in the wild I am sometimes overcome by either the studied ennui of youth or the studied intransigence of “conservatives”, with the result that I will start thumping something, usually a table, and usually not with a shoe. But put my personal prophetic pecadillos aside — I am not my game.
His argument is that persuasive games are often too preachy and may not actually persuade. I think I agree, actually, which is why I’ve been emphasizing the concept of a fair “sandbox” in which to try out various global warming strategies. My theory is that if you give people a world to play in, they’ll figure out how to map it themselves.