Serious Games

What is flow?

Flow is that force or state of mind that you're in when time seizes to exist and you just go with it. For example, when you're reading a book that you just can't put down. You end up staying up til 3 am because you can't stop turning those pages. That is a state of flow. This is something that we experience in games and in other aspects of life.

Cartoons were originally made for entertainment; they were made to make people laugh. What if we move cartoons to the other side of the continuum? What if we use cartoons to make a political statement?

What if we take this same idea and employ it with games?

Consider the "game," September 12...
The purpose of this game is to kill terrorist.

"This is not a game. You can't win and you can't lose. This is a simulation."

This "game" is really a statement by one person on how they view the war on terror.

The more terrorist you try an take out, the more you incidentally create. Because they are all running around in a narrow space there is no way to take out a terrorist without taking out an innocent civilian. What does this say about what's going on in Iraq?

The creator is asking, "How do you deal with something as complex as terrorism?"

Another example of this is the Madrid game...

The purpose of this game is to keep the memory of the people lost in the Spain terrorist attack and the people lost in terrorist attacks throughout the world.

So, what do you gather from this game? Frustration. This game provokes that emotion of frustration; frustration stemming from not being able to keep the memory of everyone alive.

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I never realized that games could be so serious. It's interesting to see how games--similar to movies and books--have the power to move us this way. They have the power to do more than entertain but to educate us and to facilitate change (or at the very least encourage dialogue about change).

Visual aspects of the Powerpuff Girls game...

-the main characters really stand out from the backdrop of the game
-the colors scheme is simple (i.e. two shades of blue, one for the sky and one for the ocean, and then the tan sand)
-the visual components, like the game's objective, is simple yet effective in serving its purpose
-the visual elements found in the game are very similar to the visual elements found in the actual television show
*This evokes the flow mentioned earlier. It facilitates an environment for the player
similar to that which they watch on tv; hence, each player gets to be their favorite
powerpuff hero.)