WC Archive

...the developers of serious games -- which are invariably geared toward the improvement of the player's knowledge, skills or even moral character -- display a good bit of pride about the subjects their products address, and may prefer another measure of success.

"Incident Commander" producer Parsons told a story about one of the beta testers for Incident Commander being sent to Louisiana to help deal with the Hurricane Katrina aftermath after spending an entire week playing the game.

"He learned things that helped him set up an 800-bed hospital for refugees in Baton Rouge," Parsons said. "If through that process, people were made more comfortable, maybe lives were saved, then that justifies any amount of time and effort we've spent on doing this."

One of the appealing aspects of the serious games concept is that it encourages the development of uncommon or previously unknown game themes and styles. Genius game designer Greg Costikyan put together a Powerpoint presentation outlining the "game styles" that haven't yet been fully explored (PPT). His presentation isn't meant to be all-inclusive, but it's worth noting one area he doesn't mention that, I strongly suspect, is likely to become an important theme for both serious and "fun" games in the years to come: planetary management.

In compiling material for the WorldChanging Book this week, I found links to classic environmental games like SimEarth, Balance of the Planet, and Global Effect. But the last of these was published in 1992; I have yet to find any more recent commercially-available/freeware games that have planetary management or the environment as their central idea. (Do you folks know of anything I might have missed?)

The final words of Costikyan's presentation, as reproduced in the title of this post, were "Go do something cool." Here's the challenge, then: go make the SimWorldchanging/Change the Planet game. That would be very cool -- and very useful.