Policy Engagement through Digital Participation (Serious Games)
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This presentation discusses the use of video games as a medium for engaging in civic issues. It provides a broad justification of video games and civic engagement as exhibiting similar goals and attributes, notable examples of engagement-centric games for a social purpose (a section of "serious games"), and recent work undertaken by the speaker.
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Policy Engagement through Digital Participation (Serious Games)
- 1. POLICY ENGAGEMENT THROUGH DIGITAL PARTICIPATION ANDREW REID, GLASGOW CALEDONIAN UNIVERSITY ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 2. ANDREW REID, GLASGOW CALEDONIAN UNIVERSITY POLICY ENGAGEMENT THROUGH DIGITAL PARTICIPATION SERIOUS GAMES ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 5. “Is Play a Solution to Civic Engagement?” “Are Games an Appropriate Choice of Environment?” The Early-Stage Perspective ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 6. Video Games and Society ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 7. Video Games and Society 1960s: Technological Enquiry and Discovery 1970s: Educational Tools 1970s-1980s: Social Environments (Arcades) 1980s-: Personal Entertainment 1990s-: Educational Software 2000s-: Social Development ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 8. Video Games and Society 1960s: Technological Enquiry and Discovery 1970s: Educational Tools 1970s-1980s: Social Environments (Arcades) 1980s-: Personal Entertainment 1990s-: Educational Software 2000s-: Social Development ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 9. Video Games and Society “Analog” Games ~700s: Mancala 3100BC: Senet 1960s: Technological Enquiry and Discovery 1970s: Educational Tools 1970s-1980s: Social Environments (Arcades) 1980s-: Personal Entertainment 1990s-: Educational Software 2000s-: Social Development ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 10. Video Games and Society “Analog” Games ~700s: Mancala 3100BC: Senet 1960s: Technological Enquiry and Discovery 1970s: Educational Tools 1970s-1980s: Social Environments (Arcades) 1980s-: Personal Entertainment 1990s-: Educational Software 2000s-: Social Development Games have been a historic method of transposing play, an innate human ability that may result in understanding, learning, discovery, and development. ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 11. Video Games and Society “Analog” Games ~700s: Mancala 3100BC: Senet 1960s: Technological Enquiry and Discovery 1970s: Educational Tools 1970s-1980s: Social Environments (Arcades) 1980s-: Personal Entertainment 1990s-: Educational Software 2000s-: Social Development Games have been a historic method of transposing play, an innate human ability that may result in understanding, learning, discovery, and development. Civic participation relies on public’s understanding of a situation, their ability to learn about causations, discover methods of intervention, and develop practices to protect and sustain their environment. ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 12. Serious Game Examples FOLDIT (UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON 2008) ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 13. Serious Game Examples PLAY TO CURE: GENES IN SPACE (GUERILLA TEA 2014) ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 14. Serious Game Examples KILLBOX (ABBAS ET AL 2015) ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 15. Civic City CONVERSE WITH AVATARS EXPLORE WORLD AND VISUALISE POLITICAL STANCE DATA COLLECTION ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 16. Project:Filter POLLUTED (2014)SEWER SWEEPER (2014) NOPILLS JAM (2014) ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 17. Project:Filter FILTER CREATION GAMEPLAY HOLE IN THE WALL (BBC 2008) ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 19. “Is Play a Solution to Civic Engagement?” Closing Thoughts Play could be the solution to exploring and discovering novel approaches in addressing civic engagement. ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
- 20. “Is Play a Solution to Civic Engagement?” Closing Thoughts Play could be the solution to exploring and discovering novel approaches in addressing civic engagement. “Are Games the Appropriate Choice of Environment?” As part of a wider campaign, yes. As a single method of intervention, no. ANDREW.REID@GCU.AC.UK @AJREID93
Editor's Notes
- Good morning! My name is Andrew Reid, and I am a PhD student at Glasgow Caledonian University. Today I want to talk about policy engagement through digital participation. Or, more specifically…
- Policy engagement through the medium of serious games.
- Just to give you some background, I studied my undergraduate at Abertay University. I chose to specialise in research, production, and education of games.
- My main project was influenced by the Scottish Referendum, and how to generate and maintain interest in politics. My research angle was investigating political engagement through games, and getting people to turn up and vote. My dissertation received an award by my lecturers, which I am quite proud of. And my game, which I’ll discuss in more detail later, featured in local and national news in Scotland, which was very odd for me as an undergraduate to see my work going public like that.
- That helped me to start my postgraduate study at GCU. I started a PhD in October 2015 on Serious Games and Social Policy. I’m looking at how games can be used for raising awareness, influencing behaviour, and driving engagement in respect to social policy and social development.
- I’ve recently started blog which I will be using to look at applications of games for research purposes, as these games don’t usually get the same level of exposure as commercial games, so I’m looking to nudge that a little bit in the right direction. I’m also using this to document my own research and game development practice and promote two-way communication with this – I’m always happy to get feedback and comments on anything that I do, so if there’s anything you may find on here that you want to share with me please don’t hesitate.
- So when I was putting together my talk for today, I wondered from what angle I should approach the topic of civic engagement. I’m not an expert in participation or engagement… In terms of games that I’ve made, I only have a few examples… And my research is very early-stage…
- So what I want to do today is to give the early-stage researcher’s perspective on this topic. I want to address two questions today that I’d like you to keep in mind…
- Is play a solution to civic engagement? And are games the appropriate medium to facilitate this? I’m not looking to answer these conclusively, but to open them up for discussion.
- So let me briefly talk about how we got to where we are with games and using them for engagement…
- If we look at video games over time, we can identify decade-defining social trends. Video games were the result of a scientific enquiry in the 1960s… Hardware was sold as tools with educational value, such as the Magnavox Odyssey2… Arcades and hits such as Pac-Man brought games into popular culture… While advancements in personal entertainment systems made home-gaming more available… Education companies aim to utilise games in a more digital-native world… And now social and scientific organisations are appreciating games as effective tools – which is why we’re all here, right?
- What I decipher from this is a sort-of ripple in the development of games. Around the 70s and 80s we see this emphasis on entertainment and pleasure that really drove crowd numbers up and inserted games into social culture. And we’ve taken another stab at educational value in games now that we have bigger numbers of players, wider demographics, and a shift in the delivery of educational content – something which we didn’t have in the early parts of the 70s. And the enquiry approach has come full circle as we start to probe whether games are good at tackling social issues. And that’s where my interests lie with games – how we can use this technology and their attributes to support social development. But, of course, games did not begin with digital technology…
- We’ve been interacting with games for many hundreds and thousands of years beforehand, with Senet, Mancala and what we call “analog” games, or games that take place outside of the digital realm. And we’ve been playing games for reasons other than entertainment. The Egyptians believed that Senet determined someone’s fate: if someone made a play and came out with something like illness or death, it’s not quite a game of fun… I’d go as far to say the first game that we know of was a “serious game” for a purpose…
- What this tells us is that the notion of play is innate in human behaviour: we’ve been playing games for centuries because it helps us to develop context pivotal to understanding and learning about the environment we’re surrounded by, and discovering and developing ways in which to address our situation.
- To me, this maps quite well to what I believe is the purpose of civic participation: we try to inform and update public understanding of certain situations; we adapt to their learning abilities in order for them to understand; we try to discover methods of intervention that work; and we develop a sustainable practice from that to protect our social environment. Attributes of play and civic engagement have very similar goals and outcomes. When we, as humans, engage in play, we are conscious or subconscious in our participation in “something”! I’m driven to understand what this “something” is: whether it’s the experience itself, or whether players become aware of the civic and social messages of the game.
- My research has led me to looking at a number of theories and frameworks for developing serious games…
- More specifically, my work is aimed at iteratively developing serious games in order to achieve an optimal outcome. Mary Flanagan’s Critical Play model is massively influential to my work: I’m a huge fan of this process. The aim of this framework is to make developers aware of the cultural and social implications of their decisions from the outset: it integrates cultural awareness into the spine of the development process. It’s very forward in the beginning, and requires you to know what it is you want to achieve – and it’s reflective and informing of whether you’ve succeeded or failed. It’s a fairly simple iterative model, but rather than the game’s development being an outcome, the real goal is always the social values and goals that you want to achieve – the game is only ever the facilitator to achieving these goals, and that’s important to keep in mind.
- I find models of visual rhetoric interesting because they aim to rank which medium is more appropriate for displaying information effectively. The Continuum of Vividness is a rank-based model of visual media and the vividness of the information that they show. So, for example, according to this model people are more likely to remember the details of a static photograph than remember the details of a descriptive account. I do have one issue with this model, and that is that there’s no differentiation within “moving images with sound” – this assumes that video games, films, cartoons, documentaries etc. initiate the same response, and we know that to be contentious…
- This is where I would contest that interactive media, such as video games, are more potent than static media such as film and animation. The interactive nature, the feedback loop, and the necessity of investing your time and effort to progress is what differentiates games from other forms of media, and makes them more powerful for fostering learning and activism. I don’t believe this to be too outlandish, as we’re seeing more and more games being created to address activism…
- Some of the most potent examples of serious games and public engagement lie within the health sector. Foldit is one of the most notable examples of serious health games in the last decade, particularly for showing what games can do in terms of engagement and involvement with science. It’s an example that required a large player community for reaching its outcomes: it outsourced particular problems to a large public in a game-like manner. This proved to be very successful for solving a highly complex problem in the Mason-Pfizer Monkey Virus, a known precursor to AIDS: what puzzled scientists for fifteen years, the over-50,000-strong player community delivered a solution within ten days. This game has influenced many future generations of engagement-centric, community-driven health games…
- Along similar themes within the health games area, Play to Cure was developed alongside Cancer Research UK by a Scottish development team called Guerilla Tea. To the player, they plot coordinates for their ship to shoot asteroids and collect “Element Alpha”; To researchers, players are identifying cancerous formations on DNA Screenings, as humans are much quicker at identifying these patterns than computers. By turning this system into a game, players have saved researchers a significant amount of time in finding a cure for cancer.
- One of my favourite projects most recently has been KillBox. It’s a two-player experience, where one player controls a drone, and another controls an abstract civilian. The game is engineered to bring about perspective and realisation to the use of drones in militaries. It’s a very powerful experience, and has resulted in people physically stop playing and walk away because they don’t want to “push the button” – that’s an incredibly-powerful response to a media type that’s meant to invite you in... It’s this level of subversive play that subjects players to the realities that drone warfare has to offer, and impacts their perspective on direct policies, such as military activity and foreign aid.
- These theories and frameworks and examples led me to develop a prototype for policy engagement, called Civic City. It’s designed to contextualise real-world politics within a video game environment and was developed during the UK General Election in 2015. Players confront avatars that represent people within society: bankers and business, education and environmentalists, and so on. The idea behind Civic City was to make politics more of an exploration of personal beliefs: in politics, you develop your own values, you have the right to your own voice, and you have the right to hold people to account. That’s what I wanted to communicate through Civic City as a way of putting politics back into the hands of the public, and making them aware that their voice does matter so they should get involved. I do have the game with me, so if you want to check it out I will set it up somewhere you can see how it works in-person.
- More recently, I’ve been working on the noPILLS Project that GCU were a research partner on. The noPILLS project is a pan-European effort to find public intervention methods in order to reduce micropollution in water supplies caused by pharmaceuticals. One of the methods that GCU has contributed is creating a game jam, where groups of students and industry professionals came together to make games based on the research. These are two games that were made as a result of this that I also have with me: Polluted and Sewer Sweeper. I’m now trying to address the limitations of these games to build my own, because it’s not the easiest topic to get people interested in at face value, so I’m trying to use the attractiveness of games to make this more appealing and raise the awareness of issues.
- The main target demographic for this project is parents: more specifically, those who are less conscious or self-managed in their consumption of over-the-counter medication. The project will involve the development of an app and a serious game. The app is a more recent decision, and so I don’t have content to show today about the app’s development. I envision the app to be in the style of a diary or log of medicinal activity: I’d love to hear if you have any ideas or examples of this sort of work. The idea for the project is to implement a serious game in schools as part of a wider lesson plan, where children will be exposed to the serious messages and feed this back to their parents through talking about their day, or requesting for help with their homework. All the while, adults are using the app to monitor their environmental impact caused by their medicinal consumption. I’m hoping to conclude that these nudges will have a larger impact on their perspectives and behaviours towards pharmaceutical consumption.
- So, the game prototype that I have developed is intended for children and was inspired from a television show about eight years ago called Hole in the Wall. Basically, people would try to mimic the shape in the wall or they would be pushed off into the water. Beyond being absolutely hilarious to watch some famous faces being dunked into a tank of water, I looked at it as a form of filter system, where the person is something that needs to be taken out of the environment. So I created a prototype that’s intended to be played in a “creator versus pollutant” environment. The creator builds walls to represent filters by placing blocks on a grid to push off the pollutant. The pollutant’s job is to survive as long as possible while collecting smaller objects to increase their score. The intended outcome is that the creator develops strategies to push the pollutant player off the arena, similar to how filter systems are built. Again, I do have the game with me to show, so if you are interested to see it in action, I can show you that at some point.
- To finish, I want to revert back to the two questions I posed to you near the beginning of this presentation and where I’m at with them.
- Play could be the solution to exploring and discovering novel approaches in addressing civic engagement. Play theory is still an expanding body of literature, and with the development of new technologies and applications of games, we’ll have a better understanding of what models of play are more appropriate for engagement.
- I believe games are very powerful as part of a wider project programme, but as a single method of intervention, games, like any other campaign method, has its limitations. Similar to how video content, flyers, posters, and websites form a campaign strategy, games are another method of campaigning, rather than an encompassing practice. Games, in all forms, are not a “silver bullet” and should not be treated as such. Thank you for listening, I hope that I have provided some inspiration to use games for engagement in social practices. My contact details are at the bottom of the slide, but if we have time and you have any questions I would love to hear from you.