This post is another in the series of posts generated for The Communications Network. It originally appeared on that site, although this is a slightly longer version.
Can games move people in ways that other forms of media like print, interactive websites and video can’t? Some really smart people in foundations, government and media say it is absolutely true. However, if you are a skeptical communications professional, you probably have a lot of questions about that assertion.
A few weeks back, I came across a valuable piece on “social games” written by Marcia Stepanek in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The bulk of the piece was an interview with Games for Change chairman Alan Gershenfeld in which he made some very bold claims about the state of the social games movement, including:
“Today, almost every major foundation and major government agency is either funding games or looking at funding games.”
And…
“There are, certainly, a lot of examples of people who have created games that have created behavior change in the real world.”
Now, I believe that I am fairly well tuned-in to what philanthropic and nonprofit leaders are doing and what new forms of communication are gaining traction. I’ve heard a few examples of interesting social games that are indeed intriguing and I am very impressed that the MacArthur Foundation is investing $50 million in its Digital Media and Learning initiatives that have a strong emphasis on games. Still, I don’t think that that the vast majority of social-change leading organizations out there have given games a great deal of consideration.
That’s not to say that they shouldn’t be thinking about the potential of social games. But we do need to provide more information about who is experimenting with social games, what are some concrete examples of success that point to the real potential of the medium and what are the factors that foundations and nonprofits considering gaming ought to think through before leaping forward.
Thankfully, two exceptionally thoughtful people helped me clarify my own thinking about social games.
First I talked to Jessica Goldfin, a Journalism Program Associate at the Knight Foundation who is immersed in the foundation’s growing commitment to social games. She told me that Knight’s interest in the medium grew organically out of its Media Innovation Initiative after three of the 2007 Knight News Challenge winners were cutting-edge games that engaged citizens. That was three years ago. There was no need to persuade Knight’s president Alberto Ibargüen of the medium’s potential, he was actually the major proponent of exploring what social games could accomplish.
While Goldfin herself is passionate about games and their ability to draw people into social problems and get them thinking and acting in new ways, she says that the foundation took an especially deliberate and studied approach to funding in this area. As Knight sought to develop a strategy for funding games, Goldfin and her colleagues first gathered research and conducted interviews from a variety of sources including experienced game developers, leading academics in the field, the Entertainment Software Association, other funders and Games for Change. From their analysis they constructed a matrix of factors they felt were necessary to consider before funding a game, such as game genre, target audience, platform, time spent in the game, development costs, production length, necessary maintenance, marketing and distribution, and shelf life. “Game development is complicated,” says Goldfin. “One of the most interesting things we learned is that sometimes the most compelling or successful socially-minded games don’t appear to be ostensibly related to the driving issue, but instead use design to engage people in new experiences. The best of these can create connections that lead to real world action.”
When asked about other foundations and nonprofits that are leaders in the field exploring the power of social games, Goldfin talked about MacArthur’s efforts, the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson’s Games for Health, ADM’s STEM education game, the UN World Food Programme, USAID and the Obama Administration.
“Games are becoming a dominant form of media,” she said, and then talked about Knight’s work in Macon, GA, and Biloxi, MS, where the Foundation is working with the game design firm Area/Code to create locative games to engage citizens and promote community problem solving. In Macon, the game in development will use an alternative form of local currency to connect residents to each other and to their community. In Biloxi, the game will focus on increasing awareness and changing habits toward disaster preparation.”
According to Goldfin, there are lots of innovative social games that are getting traction. She named the multiple games being used effectively in educational curriculum by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s iCivics initiative; an initiative of the World Wide Web Foundation that teaches kids how to create their own games; the World Bank Institute’s Evoke and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s Budget Ball game, among several that foundation has created.
She also talked about several of the leading game development companies doing innovative work on social games including Area/Code, Filament Games and Persuasive Games.
Next I talked to Games for Change’s new Co-President Asi Burak. He says that games have the power to bring people into a social condition that other forms of media cannot, that they “allow people to make real, meaningful choices and to get feedback on those choices.” He described media like print and video as “linear/passive media” and said that those forms mostly project from a single, scripted perspective, whereas games allow people to explore multiple perspectives in an immersive way. “It is quite powerful to put a person in another’s shoes. And, you can let people experience failure in a safe environment that allows for solution creation they wouldn’t otherwise experience.”
He noted Alan Gershenfeld’s previous comments on how several foundations that are funding games are becoming “accidental publishers,” and may not be aware just how complicated game development can be. It’s not like producing a video, which is fairly straightforward and the product can be played on many platforms. Games production is exceedingly complex and the technologies for every platform are different – so you can’t produce a single game product that runs on the web, on a game console and on the various mobile platforms for iPhone, Android, etc. Therefore, foundations and nonprofits interested in doing games need to take the time to really think through who they are trying to reach, what platforms the audience uses (and in what context) and what concrete social change they want to move toward.
In the coming months, Games for Change is going to be putting on their website a lot more information and advice for foundations and nonprofits looking to get into games, including a list of developers, case studies and key issues to consider. They are also going to offer consulting services to those who would like more hands-on guidance.
He gave a very helpful list of “Eight Steps” in the game development process that any serious organization should discuss and detail before even beginning to reach out to potential game developers:
- Audience. You should define your audience in very fine detail. What is the age of the audience? What is their geographic location? What language do they speak? What is their socio-economic status? What is their gaming ability?
- Context. Where would the audience be playing the game, in front of a computer, on the subway, on a mobile phone in Tehran? Would the player be assisted by a moderator or a teacher?
- Goals. This is all about the impact you want to make. What do you want users to take away from the game? Do you want your audience to take action in the real world? Donate? Learn specific information or skills? Have a change in perception?
- Platform. This is strongly tied to audience, context and goals. A game that runs on iPhone will appeal to a certain audience. If you’re trying to reach young, poor African men, then an SMS-based game is more realistic.
- Financial model and sustainability. You can’t just budget for the cost of creating a game. You need to budget for ongoing maintenance and upgrading of the game itself as well as costs for dissemination and publicizing the game beyond its launch.
- Game Design. Not until this point can you fully consider the actual construction of the game and what “gameplay” will be taking place on the screen. All the other decisions in the steps before should feed into the action on the screen that might be appealing to users and drive the impact goals you defined.
- Execution. Given all the decisions that have been considered in the previous steps, who might be the best development team to partner with? Plus, who are the other partners that would be key to distribution efforts and other aspects of sustainability?
- Assessment. Developing concrete metrics of desired impact is important and obviously should be strongly linked to the goals of step 3. Discussing the metrics is important, but so is planning how information will be collected and the costs associated with evaluation.
I asked Burak about some of the best examples of leaders in the field. He also named MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the World Bank Institute, and iCivics, but added USAID, the European Union and a host of U.S. government agencies.
At this point, I felt like I had heard a lot of really important information about what to consider and what some of the leading organizations are doing. But I still had questions about demonstrable impact. I had asked both Goldfin and Burak to name an example of a game that had really created some significant social improvement. Burak talked about how the “Darfur is Dying” game had generated “50,000 actions” (in the form of letters to legislators) and about an organization in India that had partnered with mobile carriers to embed an HIV awareness game on 64 million devices that had actually generated 10 million sessions.
Both Goldfin and Burak are strong believers in the importance of dedicating funds to evaluate the impact of games and are confident that research and experience will eventually substantiate the power of social games.
Goldfin and Burak also both said that the future of social games is surely in mobile platforms – games that are played on phones and other small devices. More and more nonprofits and foundations are indeed creating iPhone and Android “apps” that provide consumers quick access to programmatic information, so perhaps social games are the next wave.
In the end, I came away from these conversations even more intrigued by the possibilities that social games present. The complexity of the process for creating and disseminating them is daunting, but I think many nonprofits and foundations are up to the challenge. I will definitely be keeping my eyes open for examples of success in this medium and maybe even playing a few social games myself to get a feel for what works.
About Michael Hamill Remaley
Michael Hamill Remaley is the President of Hamill Remaley Communications. Previously, he was Director of Communications at the Russell Sage Foundation and Prior to that was Vice President and Director of Communications at Public Agenda. He has held a variety of positions at organizations such as The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, TCC Group and the Center for Social Policy and Community Development.