My Thoughts on the games played in class:
The McDonald’s game does a good job at being entertaining and easy to understand. I found myself engaged rather well in maintaining a business. The point is gotten across rather well as well in some regards with a bit of thought. The limited land represents limited space, and the bulldozing of rainforests and displacement of native populations is a bit in your face, but not quite over the top. Some of the satire comes across a bit heavy, but I think that is the point to some degree, and it is implemented just enough to get a chuckle out of you without just making you roll your eyes. It’s tough to get a lot of people to engage with ideas they may not agree with and entertaining them is a surefire way to at least open them up.
The monopoly game was monopoly with a twist. Each player was assigned a socioeconomic role before the game, such as minorities, single women, the 1%, and white middle class men. The white men played the game as normal, minorities had to roll below a certain number to stay out of jail and had economic penalties. The single females had a lot of economic penalties and could only collect half rent, and the 1% had a slough of benefits. I understand what the game was set up to illustrate, but there were certain elements that just made it difficult for me to take seriously, namely the way the two “lowest” classes were represented. Our minority player was unable to stay out of jail for more than even 1 turn for the entire game, and myself and the other single female player just made about as much progress as the standard rules player with half income from rent. Perhaps it was because our game was short. I understand the purpose of the game is to put people in other’s shoes, but I feel like I was put into a bad caricature of someone else’s shoes rather than an accurate depiction. I will say that it made me think more on the issues of inequality in society, even if I have my criticisms of the implementation. In that regard, it certainly succeeded.
Game Ideas
- Pollution
I love the forest, and I love the mountains. God’s creation is glorious, and our treatment of it is atrocious at times. Every time I pass a new suburban McMansion development, I cringe nearly inside out. With that said, my first idea is a game about building one such plan. The player will be presented with many beautiful natural landscapes teeming with life, and can choose one to build on. They will then bulldoze and prepare the land, then flatten the terrain, leaving them with a large flat dirt plot to build on. Next, they will be shown a wide variety of houses to build in the plan. These designs will all be the same house, but maybe with different facades to make them appear unique. Once the houses are built, the player will get to manage the waste collection and disposal as well as the maintenance of the neighborhood, illustrating how much trash comes from each household and how poorly it is disposed of.
2. Farming
A little known fact about farming is that Soy farming is incredibly destructive to the ecosystem. Soy is a crop that requires absolutely no other living things to be in the field with it, so farmers have to kill every animal in their soy fields to get a good harvest. This game would simply involve getting a soy crop planted and harvested, requiring the player to remove every animal in the fields or suffer penalties to their harvest. If enough dies, they will fail and their farm will go bankrupt. They will also need to irrigate the field and make sure to tend the crop correctly, which will show how much water and how many other resources go into the process.
3.Firearms
I know I have a different take on this one than a lot of people. I will admit I am quite pro- gun, and this game would illustrate the importance of firearms in our society by taking the player through a few different historical events. The idea would not be to persuade them to purchase or use firearms, but to show how they can be used both as tools of oppression and of liberty depending on the hands in which they lay. The first event would be the American revolution, namely, the Boston massacre. The player would be in charge of controlling a soldier for the British Empire, and would be present when the massacre occurred. Following this, the player will be transported forward in time to the American Revolution, put into the shoes of a Continental Army soldier during the siege of Yorktown. This section would end on the capture of General Cornwallis at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. Next, the game would flash forward to the Wounded Knee Massacre, which occurred in 1890, and was a massacre of nearly 300 Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek by the United States Government over a form of peaceful protest. The player would be forced into the shoes of one of these United States Soldiers as the event unfolded. The game would continue to flip back and forth like this, skipping across history until we reached the modern day, where it would put the player into the shoes of a Ukrainian man defending his home against invading Russians.
4. Writing
Another unpopular opinion of mine is that art can be objectively judged for quality, including writing. This game would be an attempt to show how contrivances, plot holes, and a lack of cause and effect is as damaging to a written work as poor technique can be to any other work. It would also attempt to illustrate the difference between objective and subjective criticism. The game would start with the circle analogy. The circle is your work of art. If you are trying to draw a circle and you draw an oval, you have failed to draw a circle(assuming we are acting within human limitations to draw a circle.) The same goes for a triangle, square, or other shape. Objectively speaking, if you draw a square, it is not a circle. If, however, you drew two circles, one with a thick stroke and one with a thin one, then people could comment that the thick stroke is more bold and stands out better, or that they think the subdued nature of the thin stroke is more representative of the circle’s infinitely sharp edge. These are subjective criticisms. This circle is our art, or our story, and is also the whole game. The circle will have a small story written beneath it, and the player will have the option to change elements of the story. Changing things so a large plot hole exists will depict the circle with a missing segment, thus breaking the circle. Introducing contrivances will slowly add more line segments in place of parts of the circle, gradually transforming it into less and less of a circle. Changing things like major events or characters in ways that maintain the story would alter the nature of the circle while preserving its glorious roundness.
5. Afterlife
This game has a player go through a simulated life after picking a faith. It tells them about that faith through their life and according to how well they lived that faith, when their character dies, they will be sent to a corresponding afterlife. This little simulation would run until the player force closes it, just to hammer the eternity angle home. This game would just be to persuade people to learn more about different faiths and ways of looking at the world while also giving them that first step into the pool.
