I’m coming to this conversation a bit late, but something was nagging at me, so I thought I’d post a comment anyway. In your mention of the backlash against the notion that games can change the world, you quote Adrian Hon as saying that games “can change the world no more – and no less – than stories or books or movies or TV shows.” This quote kind of bugged me in a couple ways. First, I’d argue that stories rival nuclear weapons and sunlight for their ability to destroy and create. A whole rant could be written about how the contexts and expectations created by stories shape every aspect of our lives. So to say that games can change the world no more and no less than stories is a little bit like saying nothing at all. But I know this wasn’t what was intended by Adrian’s comment, so I’ll skip that one for now. The thing that keeps me thinking about all this relates to the notion of the “game-ification” of everything, and the real differences between storytelling and game play. Games are engines for behaviour. They do not exist without action. ARGs, pervasive games, and other games that are layered on top of our everyday lives by definition layer new actions atop our normal activity flow. That’s what they are. They change the way we move, the way we interact with others, the range of our interactions, and so on. Books and movies *may* do the same thing, in terms of their capacity to inspire and instruct, but behavioral shifts are an intrinsic and constituent part of game play. For me, this is a powerful affordance that lends some credence to the imaginings of designers like Jane McGonigal. I certainly don’t want everything to be scored and ranked in the manner of the dystopia envisioned in Schell’s recent talk. But I also feel like there are some really powerful progressive opportunities here. And maybe that’s another thing about parody — when people start making fun of something, you know you’re onto something good.

Thanks for another awesome and provocative post!

Jeff

I’ll tone down the comments about criticism within the game therefore. Didn’t realise/didn’t check!

It will be interesting to see whether there is an official response. There probably doesn’t need to be. It may only encourage people to be for or against the game, which isn’t the point and wouldn’t be good for either games.

My reaction to the content added to the Urgent Evoke website seems to have been a bit hasty. I was worried that a string of anti-WTO/IMF posts added in rapid succession was an attempt to drown out the discourse on the site. That has not been the case, and everything has been quite cordial. I am, however, still interested in seeing how the design team will react to the “invoke” tag (if they do at all).