Can game design choices affect public policy?

Games
#1

I’m an editor of a news site that covers suburban communities west of Minneapolis.

One of the big issues in our region is finding the best transportation balance between automobiles, buses, bikes and light rail transit. With the latest version of SimCity coming out soon, I thought my readers would be interested in exploring how a game designer’s choices might influence players’ perceptions of real-world processes — as can happen with other media. Specifically, could the transportation model in a blockbuster franchise like SimCity lead to certain assumptions in players’ minds that shape opinions on public policy?

I’m posting here for two reasons. First, I’m curious what y’all think: What choices do designers have to make when modeling something in the real world? Are these choices impacted by the designers’ biases and worldview? What impact do those choices have on how players interpret the real world?

Second, I’d love to set up an interview with any designers out there who have had to answer these questions when creating their own games. If you’re interested in talking, you can just e-mail me at [email protected].

#2

Here’s something from 2008 you may have come across already.

Take SimCity, in which players engage in municipal tasks such as zoning property, laying out power grids and streets, building police stations, and managing transportation. There’s no city council or finicky court system. You play mayor, urban planner, and puppet master all at once—Rudy Giuliani’s executive utopia.

While most SimCity addicts were busy building cities and then destroying them via earthquake, wonkier types were puzzling over the game’s rules and value system. In a 1994 article in the American Prospect, Paul Starr referred to SimCity’s “hidden curriculum.” He noted that success required players to build cities on an industrial base, and he criticized the game’s bias against mixed-use development. Private land values were pegged to the public budget, and the city’s health depended on zoning and allocation of resources, which determined tax receipts. The underlying structure of the game was, in the words of Wright himself, a “capitalistic land value ecology.”

Other critics questioned the absence of race, pointing out that simulating urban decay without taking ethnicity into account was unrealistic, if not manipulative. And then there were taxes. Raise them enough, and your citizens would riot. Every kid who played SimCity absorbed the underlying message: Taxes are dangerous. This was Milton Friedman in code. Still, it wasn’t enough to satisfy conservatives. They said the game punished players for buying nuclear power plants while rewarding them for building mass transit. They grumbled that the game ignored the private market and depicted the state as the sole engine for urban growth. (For what it’s worth, in the last year Wright has donated nearly $100,000 to Republican political causes. He backed Giuliani for president. He now supports McCain.)

And maybe this.

The specific activities most games imitate are those associated with what has come to be called “the military-entertainment complex.” And it’s often proposed that the dignity of games therefore lies in their future utility: play Doom now so you can pilot a Predator drone later, or learn to reduce your workforce with a click of a mouse. But the most potent allure of games surely lies in their fantasized, not their realistic, relationship to work. Here, control is angstless, effortless, and enormous: you can watch rioters take to the streets of your Roman city for two minutes of gametime, send out the police, cut taxes, shelter the rich, and watch your city blossom with gentrified villas some five minutes later. There is no game, at least not yet, in which you accomplish the mission only to learn you’ve been torturing an innocent man, or get passed over for promotion. Neither is your guitar heroism cut short by an overdose of heroin or rooted in coping with your abusive father. Here is a very un-labor-force-like experience of meaningful activity.

For the best writers on video games, games are not art and don’t need to be. Games are, by design, what Plato believed epic poetry to be: ethics manuals for inhabitants of the cave. Games like Warcraft or Vice City or Civilization teach us a certain relentless, captivating logic. The logic goes like this: It doesn’t matter how beautiful your city, or character, or civilization is, so long as it dominates. We, the game masters, have given you many chances to spend your time and game resources unwisely—to build beautiful things, and to train your samurai—but the wise player knows that the winning strategy is of the scorched-earth variety. Don’t cultivate, or build, or train into expertise lots of the lowest and cheapest items on your market menu. Conquer, overpopulate, overpollute, or the computer will do this to you! These actions have clear beneficial consequences for your side, even if only sociopaths and corporations would consciously take them in real life.

The games are paradoxical. Succumbing to total self-interest, you can forget the particulars of yourself for a few hours; adapting yourself to the ruling global order, you can be the one giving orders for a while. The accompanying feeling of chagrin mixed with grandiosity, of absorption more than fun—this is more like drugs than art (not for nothing are games called “nerd crack”). And as with drugs you never know how much you might still need them in better society. In an achieved utopia, would we would still be playing these games? Would even the citizens of a happier planet—or they especially—need sumptuous regular holidays from morality, homeopathic plunges into narcissistic devastation? It would be interesting to find out. In the meantime, it’s pretty suspicious how closely the logic of game worlds resembles that of our world-system. With only the difference—a big one—that in games alone can you identify with yourself and your world at one and the same time. Your interest can be your world’s; its interests, yours.

I’m not a designer, but yeah, I’m fairly sure that games lead to assumptions in players’ minds. That’s the whole rationale behind gamification, which I regard as a great evil of the age.

#3

Fascinating topic, and one I’ve struggled with a bit myself (I’m the designer of this game: http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy2) as I’m working on Democracy 3. I would contend, first of all, that the way public policy choices are presented within a game ABSOLUTELY affects and changes peoples views of those policies in the real world. Sim city, as an example is very dismissive of the problems that packing people together in big cities can cause. There is no modelling of noise levels, or any real drive by people to live nearby substantial green space. There are no ghettos, and the general ‘message’ of the game seems to be that big cities are good, bigger cities are even better, and the more you can pack people in, the better, with the perfect solution being a US-style symmetrical grid system. It’s very clearly a game that’s been designed with american metropolises in mind, rather than, for example a rural english town.

One of the problems in games of this style are that sometimes real data, and real choices are not sufficiently ‘gamey’. For example, in Democracy 2, the data regarding costs and incomes is completely made up, because the real world data is less ‘fun’. The USA (for example) has a ridiculously big military budget, which makes for less interesting choices, and the UK has a ridiculously big Welfare budget. The game is filled with more ‘fun’ choices if I pretend no single source of government expenditure or income is that large.

You might also be interested in ‘fate of the world’. I know the main guy behind it was quite a serious environmentalist, and the game gets a lot of grief for being ‘too hard’ and ‘too depressing’, where the game simply aimed to present the facts and choices as accurately as they could research them.

#4

I’d throw in some the Introversion stuff, Prison Architect and Defcon, which are in some aspect intended to “influence players’ perceptions of real-world processes”.

Chris also hinted that his game will have a strong moral dimension, and that it will explore what happens when private prisons are run with public funds. “It’s an interesting moral conundrum, when you’ve got shareholders and things, and you have to think about the profit of a prison. It leads to some quite interesting choices.” Then there’s the question of punishment versus rehabilitation – whether you should hate the sin, or the sinner. The degree of actual punishment virtual screws will get to mete out has clearly played on Chris’s mind.

http://www.pcpowerplay.com.au/2012/01/chris-delay-the-pcpp-interview/2/

#5

I’d throw in some the Introversion stuff, Prison Architect and Defcon, which are in some aspect intended to “influence players’ perceptions of real-world processes”. Prison Architect seems to be a critique of the private prison system exposed through gameplay systems:

Chris also hinted that his game will have a strong moral dimension, and that it will explore what happens when private prisons are run with public funds. “It’s an interesting moral conundrum, when you’ve got shareholders and things, and you have to think about the profit of a prison. It leads to some quite interesting choices.” Then there’s the question of punishment versus rehabilitation – whether you should hate the sin, or the sinner. The degree of actual punishment virtual screws will get to mete out has clearly played on Chris’s mind.

http://www.pcpowerplay.com.au/2012/01/chris-delay-the-pcpp-interview/2/

#6

I think games have the same advantages and pitfalls of all entertainment media. They’re a great way to disseminate information and highlight social issues, but with the caveat that the information may be simplified or otherwise altered in the name of entertainment.

#7

I agree, because the whole premise behind having ‘games’ at all is to learn (learn by play), you see it in the animal kingdom also. To the gamer that doesn’t want to think deep on it, a game is merely a passing distraction, something to keep them occupied, but the basis of games and why they exist is more relevant and powerful than that, they have always been a fundamental part of life and experience and learning. It’s one reason i’m down on the hyper-violence games industry (often sponsored by the weapons industry) in general.

#8

civilization is another game where the game design suggest things about the world instead of educating us about the world.

#9

I really hope that nobody bases public policy decisions off the choices made by the designers of Cities in Motion. Because the main lesson of that game seems to be to ignore all other options and go heavily into debt to build a short metro line with two stops. Any attempt to build a bus network will simply clog up your roads, and a modest, useful tram network is vastly less profitable and sustainable than a boondoggle underground between the train station/airport and your commercial district.

The USA (for example) has a ridiculously big military budget,

And in the game!

#10

Agreeing with much of the above, I think it’s fairly obvious that games can have an impact on the way people approach problems. A city builder like SimCity is essentially a model representing the real world using certain assumptions. Playing the game habituates the player to those assumptions. Essentially, you’re spending a very long time testing the model that the designers put into place, but without any checks back to the real world, as would be done in an academic environment.

The answers here are, respectively: All of them. Yes. Depends on the player.

To be clear, when you’re designing a computer program of any sort, game or otherwise, all the logic that goes behind the game is manufactured. All of the representation of that logic is entirely manufactured as well. Saying that “police stations decrease crime in area X” actually means “object P changes variable C in radius R”, those are all defined arbitrarily. A police station could just as easily generate power, or increase traffic congestion, or anything else. Generally, simulation designers will attempt to make their models match with real-life, because they want the results to make sense to the player, but a lot of things in the real world may have hidden effects that aren’t obvious. What the designer is concerned about more that real-world accuracy is making their model adhere to player expectations. If there are counter-intuitive results borne out in real world data, these may intentionally be modeled incorrectly in order that clearer cause and effect be implemented.

Designing a game is a mix between designing a system (the city simulation) and communicating that system to the players. Particularly for mass-market sim games like SimCity, accessibility demands that the number of totally hidden variables is reduced.

As for designer bias, as with any model (economic, scientific, etc.) is by definition a simplification of the real world that focuses on particular aspects at the expense of others. Even without an intentional point to make, the interests of the designers are going to show through simply in the nature of which elements they decide to represent, and which ones they omit, and how much importance is placed on the elements that are represented.

That all being said, I think you’d have to really look at the data to see if this has any potential impact on real-world policy decisions. You’d need to look at sales numbers, demographic information about how likely simcity players are to vote, etc to see if there’s any kind of meaningful voting block. If it was really huge, like pop-culture saturation / Avatar / Twilight huge, it would be a different story. But I just don’t see that happening. It’s also possible that a single mayor / councilman, etc in the right position playing the game would skew the policy accordingly, but that would be a pretty long shot.

#11

Thanks for helping me think through all the facets of my questions. Y’all were very helpful. Here’s the final series:



Feel free to let me know what you think or chime in on the site itself.