Gameology 2.0

Worth1000.com is a Photoshopping community where users submit their work to weekly contests. The entries are typically high-quality and often quite clever, and BoingBoing frequently links to the contest listings. The current offering is certainly amusing -- "Beta Busts 5: Video games that never got made" -- and it provides some interesting points of discussion. The premise is that users create box art for games that never made it, and while many of the results reflect crude, sophomoric, or homophobic humour, some actually present viable game ideas. In fact, even though the entries here are intended to be humorous, some have actually already been made, though not always in the form and tone implied by their satiric context here.

For example, several of the fake games place present day, real world conflicts in games, so it is not surprising that Kuma War Games, a free war game which offers downloadable missions based on current events, has already made at least one. The parodic Border Guard: Green Card Edition looks a lot like Mission 73: Mexican Border Battle (as well as, dare I say, Border Patrol), and I'm sure Kuma is working on something along the lines of Battlefield 2: War in Lebanon. (Of course, Battlefield 2 has already been erroneously implicated in Middle East Politics). Also, Gonzalo Frasca notes a handful of Israel-Lebanon newsgames already circulating.

A couple of fake games based on Zinedine Zidane's headbutt attack at the World Cup, FIFA Fighter and Zidane's Pro Revolution Soccer: "The Rules Have Changed find precedent in a pair of real games (1, 2).

There's also a SIM President, which appears to be basically the same as probably dozens of political simulators like Democracy, Election Day, or even The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, and Molleindustria has already made something quite like Fast Food Manager 2006 in their McDonald's Videogame.

Finally, the fake Bitris has (if I understand the premise) already been made as 1D Tetris.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from these parallels. Many of these actual games seem to exist for the same purpose as the parody titles -- to create irony by juxtaposing unusual or inappropriate content with the idea of a video game. In other words, the very idea that you could play a game wherein you re-enact Zidane's crushing headbutt is supposed to be funny. The only addition that an actual game provides is to augment the initial idea with a little slapstick.

On the other hand, it's obviously not fair to say the same of "Border Guard: Green Card Edition" or "Fast Food Manager" where the existence of an actual game has the ability to expose the underlying complexity of the idea. Perhaps the McDonald's Video Game derives some of its punch from the same parodic intent that makes the fake Fast Food Manager funny, but the game itself reflects the more complex reality that underlies the supposed banality driving the humor of the parody. Conversely, a game about the current conflict in Lebanon might be able to convey some of the complexities of the situation, but it would have to get over the parodic or satirical assumption derived from the kind of humor accomplished in this Worth1000 contest. In other words, the novelty of the juxtaposition of a game with something so serious would probably work against the potential effect of such a game. This is an important point because I think it gets to the idea of simulation fever that Ian Bogost introduces in Unit Operations in which the gap between the simulation itself and the users's experience or expectation of the simulation constitutes its net effect. In this case, these parodic titles seem to highlight the difficulty of bypassing the gameness of serious or political simulations while at the same time demonstrating the market for humorous or ironic newsgames.

I think the overarching point here is that video games still have some work to do to be taken seriously, and their seriousness may always be tainted with a bit of the "Gee whiz! A video game!" attitude that makes these parody titles funny. I'm not the first to say it, but it may be up to us as educators to encourage the kind of simulation literacy that can make the full potential of serious gaming more accessible.