Taxes FTW
Ian Bogost (or at least his company) has a new game out about federal spending called Budget Hero. The game has you selecting up to three goals for your budget, such robust defense, environmental safety, etc., then increasing or decreasing spending in several areas by play ‘cards’ particular to each category. Underneath it all you can track the surplus or deficit of your proposed budget and the percentage of the GDP that you’ll spend. When you’re finished just click a button and see your decisions play out over 20 years.
The game should win an award for confusing/bad interaction/UI design. It’s alright though, because all you really need to do is click on ‘Taxes’ and then play the card that says “Repeal the Bush tax cuts, tax the rich”. This will generate enough money to pay for almost any of the goals that you selected. Yay for procedural rhetoric…
Game like this are interesting. The reason I can never get into them is because they are inherently doomed to being propaganda, no matter how “realistic” it wants to be. Because extremely complex real-life systems of economy and politics are being reduced to playable game mechanics and algorithms, the way in which it is abstracted IS a political statement even if it doesn’t want to be. That idea is cool, but I feel like most of these games aren’t aware of themselves as statements, so they ultimately fail to be educational at all.
Or am I missing something here? Does this totally know its propaganda?
Bogost is a smart guy and he knows he’s sending a message. In fact, he’s argued that there’s no such thing as a simulation that doesn’t have some built-in bias.
The problem is that he tends to 1) try to make too many points at the same time, and/or 2) buries his point with confusing interaction design. Also, his games in general seem to lack a visual polish that’s becoming pretty common even in Flash games.
That games are rhetorical statements and can be persuasive is the explicit and intentional point of Budget Hero and other Bogost games. It’s not obvious at all that they are “doomed to being propoganda”. Why shouldn’t they be able to function like, for example, political cartoons, which express a particular point of view in an exagerrated, striking manner? (This is not a rhetorical question by the way, I think the answer to this question is far from “they obviously should”.)
>> The problem is that he tends to 1) try to make too many points at the same time, and/or 2) buries his point with confusing interaction design.
I agree that those problems are present here. I’m not sure that those are the only problems, or the most important ones. I’m not convinced that with a more focused agenda and clearer interface this game would do what it wants to do.
I have a theory, just a theory, that goes like this:
Bogost, or any persuasive game creator, has to choose one of the three following, mutually exclusive choices:
A) a game which “says” something you never intended, a game in which, for example, a player can maintain national health and wellness within a balanced budget by denying healthcare to everyone except the super rich, a game that is capable of causing the creator to say “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.”
B) a game that isn’t a game at all, but is basically a multimedia presentation with some clicking in it
C) a perfectly good game that sits alongside your rhetorical message, but doesn’t embody or express it in any deep structural way, sort of like a piece of music playing behind a speech