Games With Social Impact Catalogued

Thanks to Terranova for pointing out the Social Impact Games site, whose goal is "to catalog the growing number of video and computer games whose primary purpose is something other than to entertain." Among the weird and wonderful entries are Straight Shooter, "A first person shooter game in which marketers hunt for clients in cities, airports and hotels around the world [and shoot 'idea' projectiles at them]", Sim Health, a little known Maxis-developed project that "...was designed to inform the debate in the summer of 1994 over what kind of health care system the United States should have", and God Speed 3D, which "puts you on a wild roller coaster ride... [as] you listen to [biblical] lesson questions."

Comments

First Post

[Renegade2010]

Eat it, bitches.

Change Maker

[BrookHarty]

Heres one that teaches, and is kinda fun. Change Maker

Thought it would be easy, but when you get into currency with 2 cent coins, made you think for a moment.

OMG they made a FPS for marketing

[linzeal]

I don't know what to say. I'm trembling in my seat wondering how this came to pass, those programers of that game will hang for this!! A god damn cell phone shooting ideas at things, ARGHHHHHHH!!!

primary vs. secondary purpose

[BortQ]

whose primary purpose is something other than to entertain

I say that any game whose primary purpose is not to entertain has no hope of ever doing anything. On the other hand if a game can primarily entertain you then it will be much more successful with its sneaky secondary purposes.

Re:primary vs. secondary purpose

[bj8rn]

I think that what the primary purpose of a game is, depends on your point of view. If you are a big corporation (like MS), the purpose of the game is to make you money, being entertaining is just a good way to sell a game. If you are the US Army or Hezbollah, the game's primary purpose is to get you more recruits. The game's primary purpose is to be entertaining only if you're a gamer.

Re:primary vs. secondary purpose

[BortQ]

But those other purposes (making $$$, making recruits) will only succeed if the game is entertaining for the players. If it is then they have a chance of making good on their purpose. But if they don't make the game entertaining, if they just tack on the entertainment part, then they will fail miserably.

That was my original point.

Feedback

[RobotWisdom]

I've only gotten three pages to load, but here's some initial feedback:

• hardcoded tablewidths of 780 are a pain in the butt if your normal windowsize is 640
• 'primary' purpose is ill-defined
• most wargames ought to qualify
• I'd like to see a single timeline for all entries, with short descriptions and links
• my overlapping timeline is here [cache]

Re:Feedback

[RobotWisdom]

I've managed to load another half-dozen pages, so here's more suggestions:

1. The top navigation-bar is the main point of interest, but it's not self-explanatory, and it's too wide, so break it up into several lines and spell out everything instead of abbreviating (COTS and Adv are way too cryptic). Also the colorscheme for this bar is near unreadable. Also, arrange the categories in order of popularity, most to least popular.

2. The front page should explain these categories for new visitors. Featuring the newest links on the front page only makes sense if most visitors visit frequently, which probably isn't true here. Have a separate new-links page for frequent visitors.

3. You've got a mild case of Harry-Knowles disease, making everything big and bold. Your lists are presumably going to get very long, so individual entries need to be as simple and lightweight as possible. (Even one layer of TABLEs will slow down page rendering a lot.)

4. Arranging entries by date-posted is totally meaningless to most visitors. I also strongly recommend AGAINST alphabetical order-- track down publication dates and arrange them from oldest to newest, or else from most important to least important.

5. The categories as they stand are not well differentiated. COTS is a catchall, and Edu is another catchall. I'd suggest you re-sort the whole list-so-far by asking "What games are most similar?" for each entry, and let the clustering emerge from the bottom up.

I didn't see "Balance of Power" on the politics page, so I imagine "Balance of the Planet" is missing too-- there probably ought to be a 'Science' page.

Games? Really?

[acxr is wasted]

"A first person shooter game in which marketers hunt for clients in cities, airports and hotels around the world [and shoot 'idea' projectiles at them.]"

...

Really, I don't know what to say. This is the worst idea for a game ever. If it's not meant to entertain, then how the hell can you call it a "game?" These programs will have no "Social Impact" because they were clearly designed by people who don't understand what makes a game a game. I don't want my stupid marketing class infecting Half-Life! Health care debates do not belong in some "activity" erroneous labeled as a game, but rather amongst citizens and politicians in the real world. Some things were simply not meant to be made into a video game.

There's a place for philosophical and moral issues in video games. In my opinion, Metal Gear Solid made that clear and handled it well. However, most of this stuff is the "crossover" genre gone nuts.

Re:Games? Really?

[RobotWisdom]

Similarly, including the Christian FPS 'Catechumen" on the politics and social page is pretty lame-- there's an infinite number of shallow Christian conversions that will flood that page and should be kept separate.

Social-and-political should be limited to sims like "Balance of Power" or the old Central-American-dictator game "Hidden Agenda".

How could they miss...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Wally Bear and the NO Gang?!? That game taught me not to let my turtle friend get talked into taking pills just to be considered "cool" by his rat buddies. That's either a life lesson or a warning about veterinarians.

This could be useful

[Qzukk]

Next time someone comes along and claims that games aren't speech, then we can toss this portfolio of educational/informative/etc. titles into their lap and ask again.

hope im not flamin but...

[UltimaL337Star]

these don't sound like social impact games, more like clevar metaphor's made into games...

Hey. They forgot...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Frontal Assault".

Now there's a game that makes an impact.
http://fa.xmunkki.org/

Should probably add

[twifkak]

September 12th to this list.