I found the episode inspiring because it uses a popular media format for social good. My chosen medium is video games and my passion is to use it for social good. Several comments from the actors and producers of the show really struck me. One of them was “re-humanizing” people who may be different in some way. The other was that people often resort to violence because they feel they are out of other options, that violence is their only solution.

When 9/11 happened, I was gun-ho blood thirsty for some vengeance and retribution. As the years passed I read more about war and terrorism and came to the conclusion that the US was going about it all wrong. That one can never stop terrorist violence by trying to kill the terrorist before they kill us. It only fuels the fire of hate that lead towards their participating in terrorism to begin with.

The people who are drawn to terrorism are no different from anyone else, but they have suffered greatly and believe they have no other options left than to commit an act of terrorism. The “global war on terrorism” is into its ninth year and in my eyes it’s only spreading. First it was Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Somalia and now it sounds like we’ll be focusing on Yemen for some time. Oh, and then there’s Pakistan, how could I forget? That’s five countries in 9 years where we have launched counter-terrorist operations, usually in the form of drone attacks that kill innocents. There is no slowing if the US continues this behavior and our vulnerability to a terrorist attack is more likely. The war is making us less safe.

Most terrorists are well educated and they must be to go to terrorist training camps. You think they pick up wooden clubs and beat each other like mindless brutes? No, they area in fast paced classes learning calculus and trigonometry and chemistry and dozens upon dozens of weapons names, stats and functionality. They’re smart and their anger is often justified.

The whole point of using military is to scare the enemy into quitting. But with most terrorists, they are fearless and actually welcome death to become a martyr. We can’t win with violence when the enemy welcomes it. We have to listen and by listening, we’ll be able to give them better solutions than resorting to terrorism. One way to stop the expansion of the “global war on terror” is to “re-humanize” the terrorists. We must understand where their hate comes from and it’s not because of our freedoms.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

Goals
I have a passion for creating games that explore more serious topics like health, the environment, human rights and war. I don’t get to make these kinds of games during my day job but I hope to one day because I believe games can provide very engaging and empowering experiences for people. I’ve written about how games can be used for good in several different articles; Using Games as a Dialog with Players, Infusing Games with a Moral Premise, and Breaking the Vicious Cycle.

Part of the reason I wanted to create What Goes Around was to challenge myself in creating a game that could communicate a specific message through gameplay mechanics (called procedural rhetoric) and combine it with other content that strengthens the message.

The term, “procedural rhetoric” comes from an article by Ian Bogost. In my experience, most games that attempt to have a procedural rhetoric tend to be void of context, such as The Marriage. Bare abstract mechanics are difficult for many players to interpret. It’s important for me to explore how to combine both contextual visual and aural elements with gameplay mechanics to say something specific and have it be easily understood.

Inspiration
I was inspired by an anti-war ad campaign titled “What Goes Around” made for Global Coalition for Peace by Big Ant International. The concept of the posters intrigued me because they were printed in wide format to be wrapped around a pole. On one of the posters, at one end was a soldier with his arm extended as if in the middle of throwing and at the other end was a grenade flying through the air. When the poster was wrapped around a pole, it looked like the grenade was being thrown at him.

Another poster with the same concept uses a fighter jet at one end having just fired a missile, which is at the opposite end. When wrapped around a pole, the missile is about to hit the back of the fighter jet.

When I saw the fighter jet poster it immediately reminded me of a video game side scrolling shooter. The concept for What Goes Around instantly came to me at that moment and I challenged myself to adapt the anti-war ad campaign to a video game format with a procedural rhetoric.

The other reason was to express my views about war, especially because at the time the concept came to me, it was August 29th, 2009 and President Obama was debating what to do in Afghanistan. To my disappointment, the night of completing this game, he announced plans to increase troop numbers by an additional 30,000 to be deployed to Afghanistan.

Designing the Procedural Rhetoric
Again, if you haven’t played the game, please do, it only takes a few minutes.

The player starts on the left side of the screen as a Predator drone that can fire one single Hellfire missile. The core mechanic that starts the procedural rhetoric is the player shooting at the target in front of them on the right side of the screen. The target, which is a Turban wearing UFO, which I like to call a Turbalien, disappears as soon as the missile gets near it.

The missile continues to move left to right and then when it reaches the right edge of the screen it wraps around to the left edge of the screen. It continues moving and looping, left to right. This establishes the message of “What goes around, comes around.”

But it needed to be more than simply having the missile loop left to right endlessly. The missile needed to destroy the player on impact to really drive home the idea that violence causes violence, that what goes around, comes around.

Iteration of Gameplay and Message
The first time I play tested it myself, I knew what would happen and moved my Predator drone out of the way so when it looped, it would pass by without incident. I realized that players could avoid the message easily and wanted to change that. I added random deviation to the Y axis of the missile’s path so that it randomly moved up or down. After a lot of iteration, I got it so that it’s impossible to survive after launching the missile. This further strengthened the message, since the delivery of the point was inevitable and also says that no matter what, past transgressions will always catch up to you, it’s just a matter of when.

During futher play testing with other people, they said they didn’t move their Predator avatar after firing the missile, and when it loops around to the left edge of the screen, they died immediately without much understanding of what happened because it was so quick. To fix this, upon launch of the missile initially, it moves down below the Predator avatar so that if the player doesn’t move their avatar, it will pass right by them.

On first pass at this new mechanic, when it was flying below the Predator avatar, the missile started to randomly move up or down, sometimes colliding with it and causing it to explode. I didn’t want that to happen so soon and had to delay the randomness of the flight path until it passed the Predator avatar. This allowed players to witness the behavior of the missile and hopefully understand what was happening.

I included images of civilians caught in war that looped right to left because I feel strongly that there is no good reason for anyone to die, especially civilians. I wanted to draw a connection to the player trying to fire at what they may perceive to be an enemy but have very little understanding of (UFO, alien) more often have unintended consequences for civilians, whether displaced, maimed, killed or losing someone they know. War is different in today’s modern times. Casualties of today’s war may grow up to be tomorrow’s Osama Bin Laden. That’s how I see it at least. It’s insanity to keep waging war and think it will lead to more peace.

The sound effects and music were done by Nikolas Sideris, who did an excellent job despite my not being able to provide him with specific direction. I was only able to communicate the kind of mood I wanted the music to evoke and he did a terrific job. I remarked to a friend that I was afraid the music might out class the whole game and I still wonder about that.

Challenging My Design Philosophy
When I began development of What Goes Around I didn’t foresee how much the game would challenge my views about game design and in the end it helped solidify my positions, their reasonings and discover new ideas.

I’m critical of lengthy single player narrative games. I think most games released are too long and overstay their welcome hours after their worth has run dry. Many games I play could easily be the same, if not better, experience in 2 – 4 hours of length. Most games don’t have mechanics with enough variety or depth to warrant more time than that and their simplistic plots get padded with busy-work objectives that do little to contribute to the heart of the story.

The goal of What Goes Around was to communicate a specific message and while I could have padded it with extra waves of targets to shoot at, I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to waste people’s time or insult them by repeating the procedural rhetoric over and over.

At one point I felt guilty that people would have to download the game but only play it for a few minutes. I realized the game should have been done in Flash. Unfortunately, I don’t have Flash and I’m not an accomplished programmer yet. Development would have slowed to a crawl and I’m sure the game would have never been released. Despite my worries and guilt, I had to ignore them and do what I felt was best for the game, making it short and to the point.

Another traditional design I chose not to implement was progression. Most shooters have the player collecting more powerful weapons and facing tougher enemies. I didn’t include that for two reasons. One, because it would unnecesarily lengthen the game. Second and more importantly it would have distracted from the message I was trying to communicate.

I see many examples of developers attempting to create “meaningful” games but they fail because they resort to mechanics that make the experience about acquiring meaningless points or achievements and it cheapens what they were trying to accomplish. Life isn’t about keeping score, it’s about the emotions we feel within and what we do with them.

One thing I didn’t realize I believed in until designing the game was the idea that it’s OK and even powerful for players not to act. That inaction is just as equally valid and acceptable a choice as acting. In the game, I try to challenge players with this by having a military commander order them to attack the Turbalien. In a way, that military commander is me talking to the player, daring them to attack. If players disregard the order and do nothing, that to me is significant. They reject the call to attack, the traditional gameplay of the genre to shoot anything and everything and instead want a peaceful resolution to war.

After demonstrating their ability to think for themselves and not blindly follow gameplay traditions, I think there is a crack in that moment where they are open to new ideas. After that, a short dialog occurs between the player’s CIA Predator drone and the Turbalien.

Finally, the most contentious part of the game is what happens after the dialog between player and Turbalien, which is nothing. Nothing new happens at all. During the dialog, the player is clued into how they can stop the war, but it’s up to the player do it. The Turbalien says to the player that they can “end the war”. Again, this is me talking to the player, trying to inspire them to act. In the main menu, there is a button labeled, “End War” which replaces the traditional “Quit Game” button. I hoped players would remember that and realize to end the war in the game, they must do what I consider to be a more powerful action, exiting the game, than an action within the game. Most play testers didn’t get that and wanted immediate closure, more ways to express themselves within the game world and not outside of it.

In a way, by quitting the game before any real reward event occurs I see it as a physical commitment to the cause of ending the actual Afghan and Iraq wars. My design goal was to transition players from game world to real world and motivate them to think about the game and its content after exiting. I wanted to motivate people and spark real action to end the wars. It may sound naive and silly, but other art forms are able to motivate people to act in various ways.

Final Thoughts
Designing What Goes Around taught me that a procedural rhetoric is fairly easy to put into games and yet we don’t see much of that, to my disappointment. There is no reason a game can’t. The Modern Warfare AC-130 mission can easily be about poor information and the inability to discern friend from foe from civilian, how one deals with inaccurate information in a war and whether following orders blindly still means doing ones duty. I hope to see more games that use mechanics as a procedural rhetoric coupled with traditional visual and aural content. While What Goes Around won’t win any awards, it proved to me there’s vast potential in this area to be explored.

Also posted on my Gamasutra blog.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

No, my problem is mainly with the fact that by and large the videogames industry prides itself on making the most addictive games possible. It’s become a selling point to claim just how addictive the game is. Or to a lesser degree, a developer will claim that someone can put in many hours because of its replayability just for the sake of replay rather than to learn something new.

I can’t think of any other media; theater, painting, music, film, novels or other, where the industry works extremely hard to create addictive works and then further encourages that practice by trying to create monetization schemes that benefit the most from addicted players.

I don’t like it. Not at all. I have a very different philosophical approach to game design. I want to create games that people only need to play once. They are certainly free to play more than that, but it’s not necessary because they get a satisfying experience the first time through.

As a social progressive game designer, I see so many people who are unknowingly victims, locked inside a vicious cycle, unable to escape because they don’t know any better. Games have the power to help free people from being victims in their daily lives. Whether it’s being a victim of prejudice, bullying, sexual harassment, social status, economic systems, disability, disease, or even their own mind, many people are trapped in a vicious cycle of victimization and can’t find ways to break away.

A game can do that though. It’s an idea that has yet to gain mainstream acceptance. Critics of the idea, without being able to see my vision with their own eyes, may call this a boring serious game, or a not so fun self-help game. It’s more than that. It’s an inspirational experience that one can relate to and gain valuable wisdom and knowledge to apply to their own lives. It’s the Erin Brockovich of videogames.

Erin Brockovich is a woman who fought against PG&E in court for polluting the drinking water of Hinkley, CA. The citizens had an abnormally high rate of cancer and sickness. Through her hard work and determination, she taught herself law to take on the powerful utility company, PG&E. The sick citizens whom she fought for were compensated $333 million after winning the suit. While money will never help them regain the health and lives lost, what she did was prove that one person can make a difference for a community by fighting for their ideals and justice.

Erin Brockovich’s story inspired millions and became a very successful film, nominated for several academy awards. Her story is one that can inspire someone to act in similar ways to fight against an injustice. It’s a story, no scratch that, it’s an experience that can be replicated in a game and give people not only the motivation but the real life tools and skills to apply in their daily lives.

In the United States, I look around and I see people who are victims of 24 hour news channels that lack news, victims of a food industry that lacks sustenance and victims of a health care industry that does not care.

It’s all shit and it’s all wrong. Everyone knows it, but few act. If only they knew their power. The games industry thrives on power fantasies, but not the kinds that can change a person’s life. Instead, it creates addictive escapist fantasies and many developers pride themselves in that. They pat each other on the back and tell one another they earned their pay by making people happy, by putting smiles on their faces. By helping them escape all shit that’s killing them.

No, they’re not doing that. Not at all. They’re only delaying the routine of victimization, if only for a few hours. But when players turn off the game and get back to their daily lives, the problems are still there. The media still controls what they think. The food still clogs their arteries and the drugs still create more problems than they solve, forcing them to take more drugs. The vicious cycle continues.

They don’t have to be victims though. My own battle with Crohn’s disease is proof of that. I was once a victim, of my own vanity. Of my own low self-esteem. My acne. I took all kinds of acne medications, one after another. From low grade to the motha-fuckin’ A-Bomb itself, Accutane. It destroyed my immune system. Years later, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease. Symptoms for people with Crohn’s can range from blood in the stool, fistulas, bowel obstructions and uncontrollable diarrhea.

It’s a shitty way to live… I can joke about it because my Crohn’s is now in remission. I learned how to break free from the vicious cycle by not listening to my pharmaceutical brainwashed doctors. Instead, I listened to my gut and changed my lifestyle and diet. It took a lot of hard work and dedication, but my story proves the benefits one can wield by refusing to be a victim.

I don’t think of Crohn’s as a curse. It’s a gift. I now eat healthier than ever before and love to cook. I don’t take life for granted. My experience proves people don’t have to be victims, not of their relationships, society, technology, corporations, government or of themselves.

However, people aren’t going to get there without a little help. A game can be the hammer that smashes the chains and breaks them free. But the kinds of games the industry strives to make aren’t going to help anyone get there any sooner. To help people realize their full potential and help improve the world, we can start by breaking the vicious cycle on addictive multi-play games. In this complex and increasingly dishonest world we live in, it’s time the videogame industry stepped up to the responsibility it has when wielding such a powerful yet largely untapped medium.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

“Dead Ends is a full 3D computer game commissioned by Channel 4 to support Disarming Britain, a major new season examining the effect of gun and knife crime on Britain’s streets.”

Overall, it is an impressive effort by student game developers who had an incredibly short amount of time to make the game, 6 weeks from initial approach to going live with public downloads. I think there are two kinds of social issue games. 1) An awareness building game and 2) a call to action game. Dead Ends succeeds as an awareness building game but I think would be more successful as a call to action game, which requires more resources. Overall I feel its biggest let down is that it doesn’t answer its own question, “why does this happen? Why do teens resort to gang life?”

The game allows you to play as a teenage gang member and a detective trying to find who murdered the teenager. I give big props to the developers for putting the player in the role of the gang member and the detective, rather than some outside observer, such as a journalist which many social issue games use. Yet, despite playing as people directly involved, the game has very little about the real life reasons for teens participating in gangs.

Again, I realize they had 6 weeks and for that it shows how important it is to give social issue games the time needed to develop a game that reaches its full potential by exploring the issues properly. Here are some ways the issue could have been explored further. As a teenager, you live in a low income home with only one parent. For gameplay, you struggle to take care of younger brothers and sisters while cooking dinner for them. You must race back and forth between the boiling pot on the stove and picking up your siblings to keep them from causing trouble. Your mother comes home from work, dead tired and expresses her concerns about paying the bills. Your family needs money quickly or else you will be forced to leave your home. You, the teenager must quit school and find work.

You go to school to hand in your papers notifying them you are leaving and run into a friend of yours. The friend mentions his gang is looking for people and they pay really well. You are free to choose whether to join or not. Pros – lots of fast money. Cons – risk going to jail. You can choose to get a job at a local fast food restaurant instead. Pros – stable, legal job. Cons – doesn’t pay enough and the family still can’t pay the bills. No matter what, due to the circumstances of your situation, you are forced to join the gang and hope for the best.

After joining the gang, you steal cars and earn a percentage on the price of the cars. The more expensive cars are more risky to steal but net you more income for your family. Soon drugs become an option and then turf wars erupt and finally the game ends tragically in the death of the player character.

As the mother, you play a short sequence where you try to do you job as best as possible, but are turned down for a promotion, possible due to a form of discrimination or your level of education.

The other component is to offer a solution. You play the part of someone who’s been sentenced to work with low income kids for a small crime they did. Your character, doesn’t respect the kids who come from low income homes but must learn to do so. You eventually help kids find suitable jobs and take skill building classes after school. The point here is to explore the issues of respect and fear and show the kids other options. The teenagers think fear is the way to get respect. They’ve never been respected in another way by an adult, especially by someone like you. Once your character learns to show them proper respect, they learn that there are other ways besides gang life to get the respect they desire.

With this approach, we see a bit more from multiple perspectives why a teenager may be driven to join a gang and ways to help them realize there are other options.

In closing, I think they could have been able to answer their own question if only more time and resources were allocated for development. Here’s hoping they get another shot at it soon.

© 2008, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.