Mundane Preaching: On the Shortfalls of “Awareness Raising” Video Games

As a creative medium with similar aesthetics and a possibility for interaction, videogames can learn from the fine arts, which have been challenged and tested in all kinds of ways. Despite their different methods of production, both media are made by creatively ambitious people who probe, promote and occasionally fall short in somewhat similar ways.

What can games developers learn from the fine arts about the difficulties of cultural production? Consider Wheatfield (1982), a six-month installation by the American artist Agnes Denes. With the support of the Public Art Fund, she planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of a rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The field was open to the public, and the harvested grain was distributed across the globe. Beautiful, certainly. And if the piece did little to reduce world hunger, it undoubtedly helped to gentrify the neighborhood and increase the artist’s social and material capital.

In Idol Worship (2007), Laura Keeble replaced the normal tombstones in a British cemetery with stone sculptures of brand logos such as McDonald’s, and the local church gained a stained-glass window with the Chanel fashion house logo. Beyond the brazen gesture, it is unclear what the intentions of this “brandalism” were. Mark Coreth created a life-sized sculpture of a polar bear at the COP 15 climate summit in 2009. Just how much energy was required to freeze nine tonnes of ice or to create the 500-kilogram bronze cast of the skeleton is unknown, but the World Wildlife Fund, which funded the sculpture (along with consumer electronics manufacturers Panasonic and Nokia), still advertised it as “art in service of the environment.”

Similarly, in 2019 the beloved and self-congratulatory eco-artist Olafur Eliasson ripped up and transported tens of kilogrammes of moss from his native Iceland for his exhibit at the Tate Modern in London. He also presented huge ice cubes at the entrance to the gallery. This was a baffling waste of resources that made little to no point other than that the artist cared about the issues of the environment, and he benefitted from major production budgets as a reward.

In 2022, the Finnish pavilion at the Venice Biennale hosted Pilvi Takala’s work Close Watch. It follows Takala’s journey to be part of the common people by working as a security person at a shopping mall. She then sides with the management when one of the workers is reprimanded for making a sexist remark. She observes the workers with scant empathy, but rather passes judgement. The other security staff presumably received no material reward for their involvement, but the piece brought maximum exposure to the artist.

Crucially, the power and the audience’s sympathy lie with the artist and the management, not with the workers. Viewers are asked to side with the white middle-class Finnish artist rather than with a poor migrant worker, whose politics may be slightly less refined. They are invited to appreciate the profound artist, who took an actual job for a few months, and to shake their head at the moral failings of working-class mall security guards.

Crudely speaking, this is art for the sake of its own spectacle and the artist’s material gain, rather than for a change of heart. Equivalents in the gaming world are regrettably numerous. To support their efforts in raising awareness about our planet’s dwindling natural resources, the band Linkin Park, in combination with Kuuluu Interactive Entertainment, created LP Recharge (2013)—a game where humans and robots battle for the earth’s remaining ores and minerals. Players are tasked with fending off the androids while creating new and sustainable energy sources. The extent to which LP Recharge “brings attention to energy poverty and clean energy solutions,” as its PR campaign suggests, remains a mystery, but the game was certainly an original way to introduce a new single for the band—even National Geographic covered it.

Another game, called Get Water! (2013), puts the player in the role of an Indian girl who wants to study but keeps getting interrupted by the need to go and fetch water. Developed by a Montreal-based start-up, the game launched on World Water Day and drew accolades from the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. Alba: A Wildlife Adventure (2020) by UsTwo Games invites the player to traverse a Mediterranean island, documenting wildlife, solving challenges and rallying the community to preserve nature against a harmful construction project. Themes of ecology, climate change and the preciousness of nature are woven into a moving story of perseverance.

While the ecological themes of the game were undoubtedly a profitable selling point, the studio also committed to planting real-life trees for every sale of the game. To date, reportedly over 1 million trees have been planted on behalf of the studio—a fine result which no doubt also assisted the title in receiving the Apple Design Award for Social Impact in 2021.

Darfur is Dying (2006) was a flash-based browser game about the crisis in Darfur, western Sudan. Made by American designer Susana Ruiz as an undergraduate project at the University of Southern California, it was partially sponsored by the popular channel MTV. The game puts the player in the role of a displaced Darfurian living in a refugee camp. The objective is to navigate through the challenges faced by refugees, including finding water, avoiding militia attacks and maintaining the camp’s well-being.

Some critics, such as Ian Bogost, brought up the fact that sometimes, self-described activist videogames have a greater impact on the game maker’s career than on the cause being championed. Although more than 1 million people had played the game by April 2007, Bogost found little evidence that the game engaged with the issues it was raising in a particularly productive, effective or innovative way. He wondered if MTV’s involvement was anything more than a marketing ploy, and whether the funds could have been spent on a more useful cause.

Art critic Claire Bishop’s seminal work Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship is an astute, empathetic critique of participatory fine art. In it, Bishop carefully dissects the victories and failures of recently fashionable contemporary art in “involving the community,” “creating dialogue” and “inviting to participate.” A few lines perfectly illustrate the necessity for art and games to grow beyond the attitudes criticized here:

The urgency of this social task has led to a situation in which socially collaborative practices are all perceived to be equally important artistic gestures of resistance: there can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of participatory art, because all are equally essential to the task of repairing the social bond. While sympathetic to the latter ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze and compare this work critically as art, since this is the institutional field in which it is endorsed and disseminated, even while the category of art remains a persistent exclusion in debates about such projects. Similar framing can and ought to be applied to games. Art is at risk of being segregated into the liminal space of perpetual commissions, interpretations and a loop of projections and normalizations of conditions.

Though they may have the best of intentions, these kinds of artistic practices fall into the category of mundane preaching, leaving the audience feeling talked down to rather than empowered. Or, in the worst-case scenario, used purely as a tool in promoting equally oppressive structures. Surely, that kind of artistic creation does not possess the charge the artist wanted for it. My aim isn’t to determine definitively that these projects have failed, but to question why failure never seems to be an option in the defensive and linguistically confined spaces of videogame reviewing.

Still, even less consistent are the practices of games developer and author Jane McGonigal. She has become known as a proponent and creator of games with a so-called higher purpose, but in the introduction to her best-seller Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, she demonstrates a discomforting hypocrisy.

Eventually, as a result of my research, I published several academic papers proposing how we could leverage the power of games to reinvent everything from government, healthcare, and education to traditional media, marketing, and entrepreneurship—even world peace. And increasingly, I found myself called on to help large companies and organizations adopt game design as an innovation strategy—from the World Bank, the American Heart Association, the National Academy of Sciences, and the US Department of Defense to McDonald’s, Intel, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the International Olympic Committee. You’ll read about many of the games I created with these organizations in this book—and for the first time, I’ll be sharing my design motivations and strategies.

Collaborations with institutions such as the World Bank, McDonald’s and the US Department of Defense for the purpose of “change for good” must be viewed with suspicion. McGonigal then becomes an agent for regressive forces. She speaks the language of kindness and goodness, with no other purpose surely than whitewashing some shady business practices.

Consider this quote from art curator Nicolas Bourriaud:

One should never mistake good intentions for strong art. Political commitment is a beginning, not an end, as generous ideas can sometimes lead to a reactionary artwork, contradicting those original intentions. Art has to start changing the world through questioning its own conditions of production and diffusion.

Bourriaud, best known for coining the term relational aesthetics, has observed that many contemporary fine artists choose to incorporate interpersonal interaction as part of their pieces. Beyond performance art, a variety of happenings, events, social actions and spaces for meeting are now a common artistic offering. This exposes another space for potential convergence between arts and games, with the latter providing ample settings for interpersonal participation, communication and interaction.

Artists working within the constraints of a gallery, but who approach their practice critically, often acknowledge the limitations of such engagement. Should we expect the same of game developers? Only by vocalizing those boundaries can we challenge them and nurture more ambitious processes. We should try to avoid the mistakes of the art world, such as street art transforming graffiti into capital without addressing the demands of the social classes who birthed the movement. Likewise, in relational aesthetics, social relations are folded into a look, rather than galvanized into a productive exchange.

Perhaps the words play or games are holding the medium back, infinitely dictating that videogames ought to be about fun, joy and gratifying rewards, even if the aesthetics are gruesome. Feelings of discomfort and disgust, of being challenged, confused or called upon to take action, are much more cumbersome investments. Demanding the efficacy of games is a tall order, but unless they are interrogated in this light, they risk getting stuck in the realm of social—and, by extension, material—capital.

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From Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World by Marijam Did. Used with permission of the publisher, Verso Books. Copyright © 2024 by Marijam Did.