Gamification is “is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges”, to borrow the course description from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania’s Gamification MOOC.
The approach has been used to try and improve employee productivity, facilitate risk prevention education (and indeed many other forms of education) , resolve social conflict, and, perhaps less surprisingly, in marketing. And just in case you thought there were any contexts in which gamification couldn’t be used, militaries are already in on the act, with both the US military and the Israeli Defence Force using it to try and cultivate favourable attitudes and support and get their message out to target audiences. Gamifiying conflict by militaries was always going to be controversial, especially when they’re actively engaged in warfare as the IDF discovered in 2012, although gamification guru Yu-kai Chou argues that this is actually just coming full circle given that most games are predicated on mimicking the essential characteristics of war in the first place.
But if trying to make war appealing and “fun” will strike many people as a negative (or at least highly pragmatic) use of gamification, what about efforts aimed at highlighting the horrors of war? Helen Berents recently responded to the release of a viral advert from UK charity War Child that is designed to raise awareness of children’s experiences of conflict. Using Storify, this post presents the debate that ensued (minus the bit that happened on Facebook, which I’ll leave Helen to summarise), and considers the role and efficacy of emotion in trying to mobilize people in support of a particular cause.
Before diving in, a warning that this is not my usual area and this is only a very preliminary overview that’s designed to begin thinking about some of the issues involved and the questions raised. Hopefully the discussion can be continued in the comments.
Thanks for writing this up Cai! I think you’ve given some really interesting framing to my initial hesitation on twitter when I first saw the ad. As someone who researches on representations of children/youth in global events and particularly in conflict I keep coming back to the ‘fundamentalism of the child’ (as Barbara Baird calls it), where ‘the child’ is invoked as a discursive category that you cannot disagree with. We simply must help this child, who we in the ‘west’ are meant to relate to somehow more because this media form (videogames) ‘speaks’ to us in a way ‘traditional’ ads do not. One of my overarching concerns is that the Triple A/ ‘Blockbuster’ videogame industry is so deeply implicated in the military-entertainment complex that a campaign like this (which is called Duty of Care, which clearly alludes to the blockbuster conventional military shooter Call of Duty, for goodness sake!) cannot escape the broader issues of glorifying violence and the distance so many Triple A games place between ‘the West and the Rest’ in their narratives.
Cai asked me to summarise some of the discussion that happened on my facebook when I raised my concerns there and I think there are some important points that were raised that I can throw in here to the conversation to further prompt other people’s thoughts hopefully. My partner is a cultural studies academic who focuses on videogames as a cultural form (@brkeogh on twitter), so I asked him and some of our media studies/film studies academic friends to weigh in. A few interesting points: one pointed out that the game logics that are drawn on, the insta-heal medkit for a seriously injured child for example, undermine the very message of the ad. Another made a super significant point which is that in film first-person perspective is not at all empathetic, it is used to invoke fear and often in horror genres. Finally, because this comment is turning into an essay, in our discussion we wondered whether the most basic ways of feeling empathy for people (seeing someone in distress) have become less potent and so there is a perceived need to reframe them in a way that is more shocking (even if War Child tries to reframe away from ‘shock’ in their discussion of the ad). Obviously a lot more detail in all three of those points, but just as starters they’ll do here now!
Finally I wonder if this is just a new form of disaster porn (seriously read Erica Burman’s 1994 “Innocents Abroad: Western Fantasies of Childhood and the Iconography of Emergencies”) that uses a fundamentalist view of childhood in a new media form. Colleague Dr Ben Abraham (@10rdben on twitter to give credit where credit is due) noted in our Facebook conversation: “this is not “war through a child’s eyes” this is a remediation of game logics through the lens of white western NGO sensibilities”. Silent posters of starving children are no longer enough? We have to up the anti.
I remain deeply conflicted about this ad campaign. Like Cai, I’m looking forward to others’ thoughts.