Sketchnote listed above!
I have one primary question coming out of this reading. The author makes an argument that by working towards a specific goal in a game, players are invited to accept, reject, or critique/question this goal. Is it always the case that making the player work towards a goal encourages a critical view of the goal? Is there a danger of falling into the trap of lost irony? Are we as game designers at risk of inadvertently making people excited about the Army and the Illinois House Republicans? I ask this because of an article I read once about the delicate balance of satire versus realism, “The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report.” The article shows data that a lot of Republicans viewed Stephen Colbert—who, I would argue, played a satirical character in The Colbert Report—as a fellow conservative. When writing satire, then, we must walk the line between effective satire and reinforcing harmful beliefs. Is there a line to walk here when making games that represent social systems? What if someone plays the McDonald’s game and discovers a passion for handling difficult PR situations created by evil corporations? What if, when faced with the cognitive dissonance of playing a bad guy, a player begins to justify that behavior to themself?
As far as relevance for my game, I thought it was cool that constraints construct meaning in a game. I was thinking, for my terminal-based game (in which exploring conspiracy theories on the internet gets you in trouble with the government), the level of open-endedness could highlight the unfairness of being punished for curiosity. The second thing I was drawn to was the idea that games can expose or explain hidden ways of thinking that drive social, political, or cultural behavior. This gives me a better grasp of how lampshading social issues would encourage people to critique them, instead of further buying into them.
