We don't need a
This argument has been made before – indeed, it underpinned the wider “games for change” movement – and I’m sympathetic to it. Exploring complex systems through games has fundamentally changed my worldview, and I’m sure I’m not alone. But players come to games for a diversity of reasons and with a diversity of goals which aren’t always in sympathy with the designer’s. For instance, Spent, a budgeting game intended to make players more sympathetic towards poor people, actually had the opposite effect on some players. Since they could ‘win’ the game, they concluded that poor people should be able to win capitalism. This is not to say games can’t build “systems literacy” – I really believe they can. But their educational benefits may be more limited in scope, and apply to fewer people, than their bounciest boosters believe. To be clear, I don’t think McDevitt is in that category: his talk was sober and modest in the power it attributed to games. Systems education should be at least part of any vision of how games can change the world.
On political games and the legacy of ‘games for change’.
