What is to be done? Games for Social Impact (Cybersalon @ Newspeak House)
January 25 2018
http://cybersalon.org/what-is-to-be-done-games-for-social-impact-next-event/
Over 2.2 bln people world-wide will be playing games in 2018. A hit game is fun but also an opportunity for deep learning and transformative experience. As technology, politics and urbanisation makes our lives more complex, games can help us to learn faster about things we need to know to thrive in this new post-truth world. Cybersalon.org will host a panel on how game creatives and social innovators can put spotlight on real-world challenges like state and work surveillance, fake news and anti-democratic practices of modern governments while providing inspiring game experience.
Rich Metson – game designer and OFF GRID co-author. The game reveals the world of surveillance and invites player to explore the avoidance and defense techniques.
Amanda Warner –”Fake It to Make it” US-based web games author and interactive designer interested in fighting propaganda and confusion in Mainstream Media in US and beyond (joining via Skype from US)
Osmiotic Studios – Hamburg-based authors of “Orwell” game, sharing the key points from the development and potential of the game for impact
Ben Greenaway – Cybersalon’s games reviewer who will discuss Anders Norén’s Riot – Civil Unrest and also impact of AI and AR in Games for Change
Simon Sarginson – Senior UX Developer at Splash Damage will review the game “Orwell”
Chairing Rosa Carbo-Mascarell – London-based game designer and Corbyn Run game co-author , Creative Director for Game Jam and Games For The Many
THOUGHTS: I thoroughly enjoyed this event. Attended out of sheer curiosity, as I saw the listing on Newspeak House. I hear about video games everywhere and have heard/watched interesting video game analysis, but have never really played video games or seen the appeal. I’m always interested in different creative mediums used to reach people and engage them beyond just entertainment purposes (while also providing the entertainment, but not letting that dilute the message behind it). So I definitely appreciated being introduced to all these video games that hope to make social impact. I found them all fascinating - I even bought the Red Strings Club! I also got to play a bit of Off Grid afterwards, which was quite cool. Looking forward to when it comes out. The panel was the highlight for me though, I found the discussion about video games as a medium informative and thought provoking.
EDITED NOTES
Off Grid the Game (Rich Metson)
Hacking, data privacy
POV of a technophobe trying to understand political impact
End up doing malicious things for a good goal
Collecting data as you go along, to build a profile
Off grid is “simplistic” (ie. a solution in the game to distract a guard is to hack the radio channel to change it to a sports channel so the guy listens to the radio for longer) to make a point
Read more: http://offgridthegame.com/ and http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-01-15-off-grid-is-about-the-principles-of-hacking
Fake it to make it (Amanda)
Targeting people who genuinely believed fake news
Higher level of skepticism + notice/fact check, explain to others/advocate how its spread
Don’t understand that it’s easy to
financial incentives (profitability of ad revenue)
Outcome map - Start with high level (what needs to happen in the world, what needs to support)
Best way for people to gain a deep understanding
Background in training and education
Skill development, behaviour change
Jeopardy: very typical game used in education, but game structure has very little to do with message - the challenge was not connected to learning goals
Game with a goal with defined set of rules to reach it
Power for people to struggle
Integrate skills, behaviours into mechanisms of game
Stories from teachers about impact
Read more: http://www.fakeittomakeitgame.com/ and https://kotaku.com/fake-news-video-game-is-a-little-too-real-1793660926
RIOT (Ben Greenaway)
RIOT, civil unrest (advocate)
Simulator
Real time strategist for police or rioters
Agency issue in games
Layer of AI/separation/representation (2D/3D)
First person = generally OK
Especially in RT strategy games
How does it feel like i’m actually there?
Model computes a reaction to your input for each game character based on different elements (training, adrenaline, etc)
Friction between intent + reality
Game is produced as response to real world events, testimony of what he experienced
Gamespot blogspot, leonard menchian
4 real world historic events (italy, greece, Spain, Egypt)
Simulation tool: how to have player agency in historical event
Key characters that were photographed in Venezuelan + chile events are baked in to the game
Not historic reenactment - fuzzy rean??, real world rules based
Is there ever a winning police/rioter strategy
Pilots use simulators
Experiments - protein folding, scientific testing
Simulation as prediction
Social change as a game (how its portrayed)
RIOT is documentary + offering new POV
Read more: http://riotsimulator.com/ and https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-the-worlds-riots-inspired-a-video-game/1100-6405315/
Simon Sarginson
Visceral effects of digital in political engagement
Exploring ideas in games: 3 games of how we interact with governments
Accessible, not very deep
How we deal with influence + govt
Games used to ask qs or answer (how can)
1) ORWELL (Goal: to find terrorists)
How public info makes you easily identifiable
More invasive
1. You get kind of bored looking through people's lives, demotivation of subject its trying to portray
2. You have a lot of power. People's lives are highly ambiguous, where you choose to surface = hugely important
Uncomfortable tension ran there with narrative of game, you’re working for an evil government
Participating, not just watching (like other art). Your agency in this. You are a pawn of evil!
Politically slanted
More: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bn3m35/orwell-is-a-game-about-surviellance-with-a-major-blindspot or http://www.surpriseattackgames.com/portfolio-items/orwell/ or https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/4/17062366/orwell-keeping-an-eye-on-you-game-surveillance-short-play
2) Papers, Please
Working as border worker
Tension: face horrible choices - if you do moral things, you pay out of own pocket
Mundane, you just want to get through it - it becomes an annoyance
Involved in process, goal: keep family alive
Very visceral way how people can be stuck in this system
More: http://www.papersplea.se/
3) Red strings club
Info broker influencing people with drinks, like big organisations (do?)
Social influence as personal vs traditional advertising
Role of influence in our lives - trans humanist slant
More: https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/22/16911206/the-red-strings-club-review or https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-red-strings-club-review/1900-6416838/
Panel
Lots of political engagement in other art forms, why not in games?
1930s in terms of timeline (where film was)
games come out of something inherently not political - the arcade, for entertainment, to disappear into something entirely different
language is still in development
only recently have video games been considered art, early times
pressure isn’t yet there from us - i need more from this game, i want you to address real issues, not just fantasy escape
reasoning, political will, game making power hasn’t come together in one package yet
when collabs happen, are often mismatched = entertainment game vibe, not in the most positive way
financial incentives, not well positioned to have independent voice. even movie industry while v large and organisational
you need scale to have political message
(young medium, the market, requires some certain independence from the way we make games)
Is there a way to speed up that process?
make better cameras (like lumiere brothers?)
unity engine didn’t think it would politicise game dev but it has (was to democratise), so much easier to do it.
we actually are able to focus on political content more, and have an ability to enter the market and compete commercially, given enough time.
comes down to tooling - access to toolkit to broader group of people
try to do too much ?
beyond confines of game just for entertainment
interaction = what makes games unique, can expose interesting ways of political process
if a game is not fun, no one will use it (unlike film, books)
harder to get entry levels/newcomers into making something interesting?
knowledge required to do a v complicated simulation = v extensive technical
games is difficult medium to use, bc hard to express politics through mechanics and not everyone can create simulations
How do you motivate existing game makers to do this?
game jams - melting point to do ideas, but nobody actually finishes them (a money thing, staying power needs financial)
paolo ?? short games on oil, drones
crowdfunding
consequence of democratisation of more accessibility to making games
if you have a broader set of people contributing content to the field (not CS people), you’ll have different stories told
ie. paperboy falling into pothole into street
politics comes from everywhere - more political games just cause you have more games
Why are society’s most vulnerable people never involved in games that comment on their lives?
south side of chicago - meant to try to engage community in grassroots led basis
maturity of the medium
indie developer without funding, hard to research communities on field (have to just do it on internet)
matty brice, nicky case (coming out) - there are people from marginalised communities making games
channels for conversations to get started
minimal toolkit to get involved, recognising that we need other input (ideation developers, modders, etc)
making games moddable ? modder culture
For Amanda: who is your audience? the people that need the information are not seeking it out
her relatives (lol)
middle of the road people, who are not so unreachable
students - digital literacy in schools
??? GTA ??
speaking up when you think something is a bit heavy handed, voice concern, pressure on studios to compete with you and make something more important / sensitive to issues
star wars battlefront 2 - in game payment system
v bad planning on EA, oversold on promise of game before release (beta & reddit)
debated in EU courts now
so much rooms for games like GTA to explore deeper in to ?? worlds ?? —> will sell more copies of they do
big boys and girls: they don’t absolutely own the market like they used to
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"What does it mean to be critical of technology today?"
Evgeny Morozov, 9 Dec, Christmas Lecture, Cybersalon @digitaslbi-labs
Morozov incensed the room. I don't think it is his politics and dark humour because I think the audience is too sophisticated to be upset by that. What pissed people off was probably more to do with his offensive stance. His deliberate one-liners such as: "I don't believe in agents", "data analysis is a privilege", or "I do not know what technology is" - really did not sit well with more than a few members of the audience. Several snide tweets and barbed questions were fired at Morozov, the Grinch that trolled Christmas.
Tbh, later in the session I felt a bit sorry for him. I prefer to think that he's part of an important counter-discourse against happy-clappy technological optimists. He's never claimed to be an activist and he probably won't make a very good one anyway because he doesn't exactly have the kind of winning charisma for mobilising people into collective action. His actions are aimed at techies, whilst those of the techies' are aimed at society - they're not even singing from the same hymn sheet.
Morozov totally denounces any idea that technology is a 'tool' for positive change as a kind of "dominating logic" and "individualistic discourse". We are trapped, he argues, in a "very narrow style of doing politics" whereby the terms of tech debates makes a lot of dangerous assumptions: e.g. information exchange is frictionless and that something will go viral just because it is good. Or policymakers' obsessions about potentialities of Big Data totally ignore entrenched global structures of inequality. For him, the problem with a lot of tech talk is what passes off as tech talk in the first place.
On his point about virality, I agree. It's been hard to steer advertising / media students away from designing research projects that aim to find the 'magic formula' or 'ingredient' of viral content. They love this essentialist, free-flowing view of Youtube videos. Most of them find the idea that what goes viral on the internet can be the result of aggressive PR, journalism, marketing, i.e. clever management (networking!) rather than the result of intrinsically 'good' qualities such as art direction and creativity - this idea is dismissed as so exceptional that it is rarely given serious consideration. This reflects a habit of thinking and talking about virality in medicalised ways ('it's a virus, you either catch it or you dont') rather than in terms of political economy or sociality. If information 'flowed' everywhere simply because it is good, then why do established well-known businesses resort to manipulation? Actually, the most successful agencies probably do both: they champion 'good' viral creativity and put in serious behind-the-scenes leg work to promote the content anyway. They never take virality for granted even as they feed the rhetoric that virality is a 'frictionless information exchange'.
Earlier this year, Lovink said that Morozov is reading tech sociology via Latour. I think it is possible to see Morozov's unpopularity at Cybersalon as a Latourian moment. It is difficult to debate this topic in such an event because he is effectively demanding that Cybersalon folks totally undermine all the assumptions that underpin the way they do things with technology, and furthermore, see that technology is no more than the social, political and economic factors that 'practice' it into existence. For anyone who sees technology as a tool for doing meaningful things, this stance is counterintuitive. Such a move might have worked elsewhere - perhaps in the formal study of history of tech - but unfortunately for Morozov in the context of a "think-tank on Digital Futures", it is very difficult, nay, impossible to make this shift. Think-tanks like Cybersalon promote interactions between techie folks, tech thinkers, tech researchers; and 80% of these kind of interactions are the means by which the thinking, talking and doing of technology become accepted.
Quite a few of the folks who regularly attend events like Cybersalon are Twitterati in 'echo chambers', to borrow a phrase from Jodi Dean, i.e. tech practitioners and writers that gravitate towards each other because they already have shared views about technology. [I follow these twitter accounts and go to these events so I'm not absolving myself here.] The format is rooted in the classic libertarian model of discourse, Morozov appears to have been invited for the sake of a public contestation of a key technology debate during which the more robust 'Truth' of technology may emerge (see John Stuart Mill in On Liberty: Thought and Discussion) victorious. Technology 'salons' can also be seen as contemporary efforts of the Habermasian idea of public sphere, an open and inclusive space in which people gather as equals to question and critique. As Dean explains, cybersalons are based on an ideal form of debate and communication in which:
"the salon as a form of computer-mediated discussion, of communication among persons linked not by proximity, tradition, or ethnicity, but by an ability to use and an interest in networked interaction. The cybersalon provides a link, as it were, to the networked complexities of communication, interaction, and information exchange in late capitalist technoculture...the mind was no longer in the service of a patron; 'opinion' became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence. The salon provided a space apart from the economy, a space where people could exchange ideas and voice criticism on matters of shared interest or concern. The vitality of the exchanges was such that new works and great minds first sought legitimacy in the salons" (in Public Culture, 2001:243).
This ideal model privileges Reason, i.e. rational debate and unbiased agenda, and "struggles that contest, resist, or reject its idealizations are excluded from the political terrain as manifestations of a terroristic irrationalism" (Dean, 2001:247). Among Morozov's audience are those who see their actions as political - targeting social action, or as championing alternative economic forms (bitcoin). They share a specific idealisation of technology as tool for (positive) change. Morozov fundamentally rejects this. No wonder the physical room itself was charged with, as my friend Peter delightfully puts it, 'a lot of sass'. Morozov's absolute rejection of technological cyber-utopian idealisations is a hard pill to swallow because they are the very ontological basis on which cybersalons are created. By the end of the Q&A, Barbrook had gone from polite host to being on a completely different solar system to Morozov, to say the least. Clearly, these established signposts and practices of tech debates aren't easy to undo or unthink; and falling short of critique of establishments, what we have left is Morozov's effigy as the ultimate troll: terroristic, irrational and extreme.
So what does it mean to be critical of technology today? After attending the event, I don't actually know. We haven't even figured out how to talk about technology, let alone be critical of it. At best we might say, based on the mostly hostile response to Morozov's talk: that there is a limit to how far tech criticism can go before it starts alienating people.
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