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depth and span
May 2009 
Games World-centric People Play
Posted on Sep 18th, 2006
by 
~C4Chaos
~C4Chaos
(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)
If you've taken a trip to your nearest gaming stores lately, you'll notice that almost all computer games fall into two categories: sports and entertainment (this includes violence, sex, pop culture, and games based on movies). Educational games is a niche category. Much less are games that elevate people's awareness of politics, economics, science, philosophy, and even spirituality.
Enter, this cool Wired article, Games Tackle Middle East Conflict, which features two computer games that deal with the Palestine and Israel conflicfts. It may not be as exciting as first-person shooters or golfing with Tiger Woods, but these kinds of games are great tools to guide people into greater awareness.
Combine these world-centric games with psycho-spiritual games, such as Wild Divine, and we'll have a new genre of "integral" gaming. Imagine playing a version of SIMs wherein you apply the theory of Spiral Dynamics (and other world view theoretical maps) onto a virtual city, in which your goal is to raise the center of gravity of the population while upholding the prime directive. Now that would be cool.
The challenge of course is getting enough audience to play these games. World-centric games have more DEPTH but they will only attract less SPAN. But who knows. I guess it's best left to this old cliche, "If we build it, they will come."
Access: PublicTagged with: WIRED, gaming, politics, video games, integral, Spiral Dynamics, worldviews, DEPTH and SPAN
the game series 'Oddworld' is quite popular and explored a lot of social and political issues as well as the environment, and corporate ethics. there were 4-5 of them made i believe. so games have been addressing issues for some time now, although not as popularly and potently as they could. oddworld was sorta the 'lord of the rings' of videogames. epic, fantastical in ways. mythological.
yep. Oddworld is cool. another popular game that gives players a god-perspective is Black and White. however, as cool as these games are, there is somewhat a disconnect from the “real” world because of their fantasy setting. but yeah, these games could also help people into making their beer-goggles more super :)
I had a similar discussion over on the I-I forums recently where I suggested:
How about this for a potential Integral video game structure…
- Your character starts out at Beige, just observing the world and experimenting with the available tools and learning basic skills (like walking and jumping around fun playground things!)
- then you become Purple, and get to explore and discover all kids of wild and crazy things in the world
- then you become Red, with egocentric aggressive power games (you win the level when you lose almost everthing and have to ask for a truce!)
- then you move up to Blue ethnocentric defensive and team building games
- then onto Orange creative and intellectual games
- then Green games of sharing the wealth, meeting new people, and expressing your individuality
- finally (?) your character gets to be all second tier like and play intricate political management games where you have to keep everyone moving up the spiral smoothly, and keep people's shadows from literally eclipsing the sun (and turning the planet into a real “dark age”).
- All the while there are little quadranty subplots going on just to keep things balanced and realistic