Are Certain Topics Off-Limits for Video Games?

When we discussed SPENT in class on Monday, someone mentioned that the game made them uncomfortable because its presentation of what is a very real struggle for a lot of people (namely, the difficulties that come with living paycheck-to-paycheck) in a virtual, gamified format effectively trivialized the issue that the game was trying to discuss. The point was made that this trivialization was largely a result of the fact that players of SPENT don't actually have to deal with the hardships depicted in the game themselves and can easily escape to the comfort of their own, secure lives once the game is over. I agree with this sentiment, and I think that SPENT has a variety of clearly identifiable design shortcomings that hinder its intended message. However, rather than focusing on these shortcomings in particular, I'm more interested in the implications of a related, broader debate: can there ever be a game that successfully comments on poverty and income inequality without having this trivializing effect? Or are there some issues that just can’t be captured through the medium of games?

To investigate these questions, I’d like to argue that we can consider SPENT to be an intervention into the genre of serious games by virtue of its “serious” subject matter as well as its attempts to educate and persuade the people who play it. As Ian Bogost explained in Persuasive Games, serious games are often defined by their use of procedural rhetoric to create meaning. In other words, the message or critique that a game is trying to portray is built into the rules of the game itself, which dictate the actions that a player is allowed to take and thus create meaning. The important thing to consider is that in cases like these, creating procedural rhetoric is the main function of the game -- not ensuring that players have a “fun” or “fulfilling” experience, as is often expected of video games. Bogost explains this when he writes that while serious games may be entertaining, that is not their primary purpose; instead, they were created with certain educational goals in mind, or to interrogate/support certain institutions in our society.

When we think about games in this way, it is clear to see that they are at their core just another type of media (albeit a special type of media, with special ways of representing different things) that people can use to comment on society and its issues. Books and documentaries often accomplish the same goal, but through different modes; books employ written rhetoric, for example, and documentaries employ visual rhetoric. Yet it seems that these three types of rhetoric are not always equal. There have been books that have explored poverty and the hardships of living paycheck-to-paycheck without being criticized for trivializing these issues. The same applies to documentaries. Granted, our sample size is small, but is there something about video games and their use of procedural rhetoric that prevents them from effectively discussing the same topics? Or is SPENT simply a case of bad design?

We must acknowledge that out of the three types of media mentioned above, video games are the newest, and therefore the least established in terms of conventions and forms. Most people who haven’t been exposed to the field of game studies (which is, in general, most people) view video games as nothing more than a form of entertainment. This means that only a minority of players will be able to recognize when a game is a “serious game,” and even fewer will spend time thinking about these games’ deeper meanings after completing them. Plus, more often than not, even these deeper-thinking players will have the subconscious expectation that games should be “fun” above all else. (I say this because I’ve caught myself thinking along the same lines while playing games for this very class, even though I know I'm supposed to be playing more critically.)

Books and movies are also typically expected to be sources of entertainment, but not as exclusively. Why is this? Genres are more established in these media forms, so people often know exactly what they’re getting into before they even start reading or watching. If you buy a nonfiction book with a blurb about income inequality, you know to expect a reading experience that will make you think more deeply about income inequality. If you watch a documentary about poverty, you know from the classification of the film as a “documentary” and the film’s description that it will be handling poverty in a serious and thought-provoking way. Games, on the other hand, often don’t have comparably strict genre constructs or accompanying explanatory documentation. The exception would be artist’s statements, but these are by no means ubiquitous. The meaning of a game is often left up to a player to interpret -- and, as mentioned before, most players are casual players who may not be inclined to look beyond the game’s entertainment value for a deeper meaning.

All of this is to say that when people play a game about a serious topic, their ingrained expectations that games should be “fun” may be part of what prevents the game from effectively conveying its message. When players do look for a deeper message, the strong association of games with entertainment may be making serious games seem like they’re trivializing certain topics by “gamifying” them simply by virtue of this association. (I’m aware that “gamification” as we have used it in this class is meant to refer to the application of game-like structures and concepts to distinctly non-game things, such as marketing. Here, I’m using the term to refer to the practice of taking a serious topic (like poverty) and representing it in game form.) Maybe, if we were to go into these games without the subconscious expectation that a game needs to be “fun” and provide us with a satisfactory way to “win,” we would be able to engage more fully with their procedural rhetoric and thus appreciate their critiques of society in ways we couldn’t before.

Having said all this, I do also believe that rhetoric quality is a huge factor in the effectiveness of any piece of media. If a book about income inequality asserted that a paycheck-to-paycheck “lifestyle” was the result of people simply making poor decisions and would be completely preventable if only they had made different choices (which, as Professor Jagoda mentioned, is a message SPENT inadvertently conveys in many ways), the effectiveness of its argument would be significantly weakened by the fact that these assertions are simply not true. The same thing would happen to a documentary that was clearly made only to piggyback off of a relevant social issue and make money rather than to actually spread awareness about the issue. I want to reiterate, then, that I believe SPENT’s ineffectiveness as a serious game stems primarily from the way that its procedural rhetoric is constructed, not from the fact that it uses procedural rhetoric at all.

In a broader context, however, the question of whether the expectations that the general society puts on video games limit the effectiveness of their procedural rhetoric is one worth examining. What would a game that addressed income inequality in a significant, productively-cricital-but-not-trivializing way look like? Could such a thing even exist? Or are there limits to procedural rhetoric that prevent certain topics from being sufficiently explored by video games -- at least until popular perceptions of the medium shift to more broadly acknowledge the possibility of deeper meanings and disavow the standard expectation that games be primarily sources of entertainment?