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clyde

Paolo Pedercini on Games for change

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Pedercini proposes that designing games to achieve measurable goals limits the type of change you may be designing for.

http://www.molleindustria.org/blog/making-games-in-a-fucked-up-world-games-for-change-2014/

 

My favorite part of this presentation is when he suggests that we should try to make ourselves obsolete. This is a key idea I've been missing in my fantasies of social justice. My fantasies typically consist of me being a benevolent dictator, telling everyone what to do for happiness.This would just make me the problem. I think the idea of making yourself obsolete (not by becoming less useful, but by making others more capable) is an excellent goal for me to strive for. It makes sense to me that game engines like Twine, freemium  pricing models, new methods of capital (like Kickstarter), and mod support do more to create the change I want. When more types of people are making games, the medium is capable of expressing more. Games that show the seams or require creative input from the player may help bridge the accessibility gap too.

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Yeah, that's fantastic. I particularly liked these bits too:
 

We are discussing games as general purpose instruments.
And in doing so we are putting the means ahead of the ends.

 

I came to the conclusion that there is a greater liberation potential in designing games rather than playing games.

 
Calling the crowd out for having wildly different objectives, to the point where they make constructive dialogue difficult, and to the point of somewhat tactfully implying to some "we are not allies", is something very few conference speakers would have the courage to do, even if they believed it. That people contemplating the didactic and behavioural implications of games have such diverse and contradictory agendas is a massive shit on the table that everyone's been politely ignoring.
 

My favorite part of this presentation is when he suggests that we should try to make ourselves obsolete. This is a key idea I've been missing in my fantasies of social justice. My fantasies typically consist of me being a benevolent dictator, telling everyone what to do for happiness.This would just make me the problem. I think the idea of making yourself obsolete (not by becoming less useful, but by making others more capable)

 
It's difficult to not unconsciously want a Nice White Guy* Certificate, but I think keeping this as an objective is a really good way to counter that. I've worked under a few total assholes in the past fifteen years (bullies, self defining "alphas", etc.), and what I've learned is that unlike them, good leaders create more, similar leaders by enabling the people who work with them.
 
*I'm not assuming you are white.

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The format of that article is maddening; when you extract half of the things you say out into pull quotes they lose a bit of their impact. o_O

I like the bit about working to become obsolete as well; soldiers should be hoping they'll be out of work soon, etc. And I can see how making a game that is anything more than Fun can be a daunting prospect -- even just trying to make a game that sometimes imparts a lasting tinge of optimism is a hard thing, let alone one that address An Issue.

I can't tell what he's trying to say about the fact that people sometimes have different goals for change. Of course a game should be About something and that something should be agreed upon beforehand by the people developing it -- but in the wider discussion of how to make a game About something, does he want "dissenters" to be somehow Dealt With, or is he just saying that thing like the Allied Media Conference (where the attendees generally know beforehand that they are all roughly homogenous in their social goals) are more useful than conferences where the attendees might have disparate values?

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I can't tell what he's trying to say about the fact that people sometimes have different goals for change. Of course a game should be About something and that something should be agreed upon beforehand by the people developing it -- but in the wider discussion of how to make a game About something, does he want "dissenters" to be somehow Dealt With, or is he just saying that thing like the Allied Media Conference (where the attendees generally know beforehand that they are all roughly homogenous in their social goals) are more useful than conferences where the attendees might have disparate values?

 

I'm not sure and I would enjoy further clarification, but until then I'll speculate. From Pedercini's talk, I get the impression that he views the Games for Change group to hold a paradigm that depends more on measurability and centralization than that of the Allied Media Conference. For him, this may be a presentation of "This is what I've learned from working with grass-roots organizations" directed at a conference of institutional power.

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