Can Games Change the World?
Influenced by Jane Mcgonigals speech on Ted, and the games I researched that are believed to have had an impact on the real world, I decided to answer this question for my 2000 word contextual studies essay.
I started by reading Jane McGonigals "Reality is Broken" which was very helpful for my research and finding games that have changed the world in some way such as "Investigate your MPs Expenses" and "The Extraordinaries"
After reading these chapters in the book, I then looked at the websites myself to gain my own research and give my own opinion on the games.
This was then final essay.
Can digital games change the world?
Video games have come a long way since the days of Pong (1972, Atari) and Pac-man (1980, Namco), when they were a form of basic gaming entertainment, similar to board games. However, once video games began to develop, so did their complexity and the possible effects on the player began to grow. Video games have become more than just a “game”, they tell stories and immerse players into whole other worlds. Even though digital games are still predominately accepted as forms of entertainment, this growth in the past 50 years, means the next 50 years could see another dramatic expansion of what a video game can be. Can it be more than just a form of entertainment? And can digital games Change the World? This essay will try and answer these questions by looking at current games that have had an impact on the real world. I will conclude the essay with my own opinion based on the research found on whether Digital games can change the world, and if so, what ethical implications could this have.
An interesting starting point for this essay was Investigate your MP’s Expenses as this was a game that had a great impact on the real world.
“There was uproar in May 2009 when claims for expensive TVs and furniture emerged…Constituents were so angry at the revelations in the Daily Telegraph - which had obtained details of all expenses claims - that many MPs announced they would be repaying claims and some have said they will stand down at the general election.” BBC News, March 2010
Back in 2009 government documents were leaked in Britain, claiming that members of parliament were regularly claiming thousands of tax payers money for personal expenses, completely unrelated to their political service. Once the public were made aware of this, they demanded that documents of the Mps claims were released so that the culprits of these actions could be caught and publicised, however, the documents were released in such a way that made it extremely difficult to sort through: “;an unsorted collection of more than a million expense forms and receipts that had been scanned electronically. The files were saved as images so it was impossible to search or to cross reference the claims.” McGonigal, 2007
Knowing that this much data would take too long to sort through, the editors of the Guardian decided to use the public and their outrage to their advantage, and created a game which the general public could join to help sort through the millions of documents and find any illegal claims. The game was created in just one week, and works by each MP’s expenses and claims are presented as a set of images, and users can determine, and detail, what entries there are on a page, and decide whether the page is unimportant, interesting, “interesting but known” (such as the £1000+ duck island) or worthy of investigation. Within the first 3 days of the game more than 20,000 players had analyzed over 170,000 electronic documents (McGonigal, 2007) showing that crowd sourcing had worked very well. Although perhaps not considered a stereotypical digital game, it involved leader boards for user who had found the most interesting items or users who had analyzed the most documents. It rewarded the users with updates of information they had found, giving a sense of self achievement and community. The table below shows what different parties spent the tax payers, and gamers, money on.

Taken from the Guardian website 8/4/2012
Perhaps the biggest reward for the users, was seeing the impact it had on the real world. The popularity of the investigation lead to MPs resigning and others paying money back. David Cameron was forced to pay back an extra £947, Gordon Brown was revealed to have charged the taxpayer almost £6,500 to green his second home in Scotland and even Tony Blair found himself under the spotlight after the documents revealed that he had claimed almost £7,000 for roof repairs two days before leaving office and standing down as an MP. I believe it is fair to say that this digital game did change the world, perhaps not on a global scale, but it certainly had an impact, it was a way of gathering information on a large scale. This game could perhaps fit into a new genre of “serious entertainment” and other games could be developed, similar to this, as a way of gathering masses of information and ideas.
The Extraordinaries is another game that is interesting to look at. Its target audience is those who feel they have not got the time to volunteer to help, but would like to, and bridges the gap between these people and the non-profit organisations that need the help. It works in a very similar way to quest driven games (such as Skyrim, Bethesda Softworks, 2011 and World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment 2004) where the user is given a number of “missions” they can chose to complete, some of which may take just a few minutes of the user’s time to complete, appealing to the usage of that “wasted” time we spend while waiting for appointments or the bus. Jane McGonigal talks about an experience her friend had with the game in her book, “Reality is Broken“. Here she talks about how her friend joined up and found a quest which simply asked for the player to find a defibrillator (an apparatus used to control heart fibrillation by application of an electric current to the chest wall or heart,) and take a picture of it and tag its location using GPS. This mission was given by the First Aid Corps, who were creating a map of every defibrillator in the world and explained in their instructions the severity of cardiac arrest and how time efficiency is important because “within 5 minutes the brain dies”. Ambulances can’t always get to the patient in time, so they were creating the map so that 911 could give locations of the defibrillators to citizens so that they could save lives in these emergencies. McGonigal talks about how easy her friend found this to complete, as there was a defibrillator he passed in his daily routine, and the “epic win” he felt was because:
“until that morning, Tom had no idea he had knowledge that could help save a life. He had a secret power he didn’t know about- and he was given a real opportunity to put that power to use.” McGonigal, 2007
In this sense, the game is not making people change the world by destroying an all powerful being, intent on destroying the world, but by finding a way to use the powers we as human beings already have, and guiding us with small tasks and rewards to change the world around us. The image below is a screen shot of the mobile application for The Extraordinaries and shows just how easy it is to use, tapping into the idea that the user can change the world in just a few minutes.

changing games, rather than a successful example.
For these alternative games to be a success, I also believe they need to become know as different genres of game, to break the stereotypical entertainment genre of gaming. Video games are becoming more than just forms of entertainment, as these games show, they are developing in a similar way to how films have developed from mere entertainment to memorable films that have had an impact on the world. An article in the Telegraph newspaper written by Mark Cousins, lists 10 films he believes have had an impact on the real world.
“I’ve spent six years travelling around the world, to make a history of the movies - the first time this has been done in this way….In all this time, one question has been in my head. Do movies matter? Have they changed the world in any way”
The Minimota films of the 1970s, also had an effect on the real world, the documentary raised awareness of Northern Japans fishing waters being poisoned with methyl mercury by the company Chisso and encouraged more responsibility to be taken to prevent these situations by other Japanese companies after victims of the p
“Sitting at the airport? Waiting for the dentist? Friend late to lunch? These are all moments in which you can give back. Just pull out your phone, fire up the app and you can do real work for real non-profits right there, on-demand and on-the-spot. It's micro-volunteering”
- Taken from The Extraordinaries description on Apples Itunes, April 2012
This has lead to the new website Sparked, created by the same people who developed The Extraordinaries, the “worlds first micro-volunteering network” Sparked website April 2012. As primary research I decided to sign up and see what I could do. Signing up required me to select a number of causes I feel more personal about, such as the environment, poverty, animal cruelty etc. and then select from a list, a number of skills I felt I have, such as design, fundraising, teaching or research, amongst many other optional skills. This enables the site to recommend missions to each user, based on what skills are required and whether the cause is considered important by the user. This is good because the user is less likely to be given a mission that he or she would feel like they could not conquer. After signing up I was taken to the home screen which immediately gave me a list of missions for me to complete.

Screenshot from sparked.com 25/4/2012
Unfortunately I was disappointed with the kinds of challenges presented to me, many were asking for logos or other forms of design to help with campaigns, all of which I am sure will help the campaigns in some way, yet they did not feel like the kinds of challenges that were really going to make a difference to someone’s life. This game certainly has the potential to change the world, but I believe we should look at this more as a prototype for world oisoning took Chisso to court. A film that created a positive outcome in the real world. Another film Cousins talks about is The Birth of a Nation, 1915 which he describes as being “famous” for its racism. Set during the American Civil War, the film follows two families, one from the North and the other from the South. In a key scene, the film shows one of the families being attacked by black soldiers, but they are then rescued by the Ku Klux Klan. Cousins states that this film aided in the revival of the KKK which had been disbanded for over 30 years, and by the 1920s, membership was up to 4 million. This film had an impact on the world, however, clearly not a world for the better. This raises the question, if 190 minutes of film can influence the world in this way, what powers of influence and persuasiveness can a video game that consist of hours of interactivity have? Investigate you’re Mps Expenses, The Extraordinaries and the games McGonigal discusses, all have had a positive outcome on the real world, but this film shows how they could easily be turned and have negative outcomes on the real world. Just like super heroes and they’re super powers, “with great power comes great responsibility” (Spider-Man 2002) and the same quote can be linked to the designs of these games that have the ability to change the world. Developers and designers of these games will havea responsibility to ensure games which could encourage negative impacts on the real world, are not released or produced especially to the masses.
In conclusion to this research report, I believe video games do have the ability to change the real world. However, there are still many flaws that need to be figured out before they can begin to have great, positive impacts. For these games to be successful and popular, they need to also establish their own genres and sub genres of video games, away from the main genre of entertainment, so that people can see them as stand-alone forms of alternative forms of entertainment. Finally, if we can create video games that can have an impact on the real world, there is a huge responsibility to ensure that this impact is a positive, un-biased one because, just like films such as The Birth of a Nation, they could be used as a form of propaganda and raising a negative awareness.
Bibliography
McGonigal, Jane (2007) Reality is Broken. New York, The Penguin Press.
Spider-man (2002) Directed by Sam Raimi. Written by Stan Lee. [DVD]
Cousins, Mark (2011) The ten films that changed the world, The Telegraph. Available from: <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-blog/8737558/The-ten-films-that-changed-the-world.html> [Accessed 7 May 2012]
(2010) Q&A: MP expenses row explained. BBC News, Available from: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8301443.stm> [Accessed 7 May 2012]
(2009) Investigate your MP’s Expenses. Available from: <http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/> [Accessed 4 April 2012]
(2012) Games for Change. Available from: <http://www.gamesforchange.org/about/> [Accessed 4 April 2012]
(2011) iTunes Preview: The Extraordinaries. Available from: <http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/the-extraordinaries/id311723405?mt=8> [Accessed 25 April 2012]
