Since game developers moved on beyond two paddles bouncing a ball back and forth, games have been produced with morally questionable gameplay, to put it mildly. It’s easy to see why games like Grand Theft Auto and Carmageddon spark the controversy that they do. Brutally killing innocent pedestrians in a very graphic way just doesn’t feel right to lots of people. But in a whole different kind of genre, it’s possible to kill millions of virtual people in different online simulation games.
What kind of games, you ask? It seems that the fear of a devastating pandemic inspired multiple on-line simulation games. The accurately named game Pandemic 2 (created months before the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic) puts you in the position of a dangerous pathogen, being your choice of bacterium, virus or parasite. The goal? Infecting and killing as much people as possible. By evolving your pathogen you can acquire increased virulence and various resistances, leading to increased infection rates. If your disease gets too visible (for example, when people start vomiting), governments will take counter-measures by closing borders & airports, eliminating the disease source and researching a vaccine against your disease. Only the right combination of traits will spell the end of human civilization as we know it.
Pick your evil: Virus, Bacterium or Parasite?
In the game Pandemic: American Swine you take up the role of the American government, which is forced to take countermeasures against a big outbreak of swine flu in 2010. Aside from protecting the civilians in danger by distributing air masks and instating curfews, the game allows you to take more.. drastic measures. For example. secretly ‘disposing’ infected Americans and nuking entire infected cities belong to the possibilities. In the meantime, the player needs to keep an eye on the panic level of the entire population, fuelled by the sensationalist media. Too many bad news reports will lead to dissent which will eventually lead to looting and protesting across the country. If you are able to vaccinate more than 75% of the population, or eliminate all traces of the swine flu (by whichever means the player deems necessary), the game is won.
On a quite different note, the game Cutthroat Capitalism simulates Somali piracy. Local tribe leaders have provided you with money and a boat to become a pirate in the Gulf of Aden. You are tasked to capture ships and negotiate a ransom for you, your investors and your crewmen. If you’re too soft on your hostages, you’re losing credibility with both your crewmen and the negotiators. If you rough up hostages too hard (or even kill them), they know that you mean business, but are also more likely to call in naval reinforcements.
These games are by no means perfect representations of the situations they simulate, because they do not have to be. Each of these games, aside from being quite enjoyable, have another merit: they promote awareness of situations most people would not have thought about. Pandemic 2 introduces the player to pathogen evolution and simple disease spread models, and to the concept of a worldwide pandemic (while most of you know the term by now, it was fairly unknown when the game was published months before the recent Swine Flu outbreak). Pandemic: American Swine puts the emphasis on the role of the media in the political stability of a country facing a major outbreak of Swine Flu and the difficulty of taking countermeasures whilst maintaining a good public image on a limited budget. The game Cutthroat Capitalism was released as an accompaniment to an article on Somali Piracy published by Wired. If anything, the message of the article that the rise of Somali piracy can be explained by the fact that it is so amazingly profitable, is reinforced by playing the game.
Feed or kill your hostages. As long as the money comes in!
I explicitly avoid the word ‘teach’, because these games are not developed with the goal of teaching in mind. They are made because they’re fun to play and (somewhat) realistically mimic relevant, but sometimes hard to understand, situations. I believe that games have the potential to be really effective in communicating difficult ideas and concepts, as these examples show, provided that they’re fun to play and put few or no emphasis on their educative aspects.
As a last observation: why don’t conservative politicians deem these games to be so controversial as GTA? Off course they’re not nearly played as much as GTA (Pandemic has 2,4 million plays on Kongregate, versus 13 million units sold of GTA), but I think the main reason is that most mothers are not that concerned that their children become inspired to study genetics and start designing their very own microbial menace capabable of eliminating all human life..
You might also like:
Recent Comments