Five New Persuasive Game Ideas
1. Climate Change — Closed Loop
Core Mechanic Inspiration: Lifecycle conversion systems (waste → resource → population support → waste again)
Game Idea:
Players manage a self-contained city where nothing can leave the system. Every product eventually becomes waste that must be processed back into usable material or energy.
Persuasive Goal:
Show that waste doesn’t disappear; it only changes form and must be accounted for somewhere in a system.
Key Mechanics:
- All items generate delayed waste tokens
- Waste can be processed into low-quality materials or energy
- Overproduction causes long-term system slowdown
- Players must design sustainable production chains
Why It Persuades:
Players experience environmental cost as a system pressure rather than a moral message.
2. Energy Use — Peak Demand
Core Mechanic Inspiration: Resource spike / stress testing systems
Game Idea:
Players run a regional energy grid trying to survive unpredictable demand spikes caused by weather, population growth, and emergencies.
Persuasive Goal:
Demonstrate that energy infrastructure must balance reliability, cost, and sustainability.
Key Mechanics:
- Power sources have ramp-up times
- Cheap energy sources cause pollution penalties later
- Renewable sources require storage planning
- Sudden demand events force hard tradeoffs
Why It Persuades:
Shows energy transition is a systems engineering challenge, not just a moral choice.
3. Political Influence — Information Economy
Core Mechanic Inspiration: Resource transformation (information → influence → control → instability)
Game Idea:
Players manage a media network competing for attention while trying to maintain credibility and long-term audience trust.
Persuasive Goal:
Show how misinformation spreads because it is efficient and profitable short term.
Key Mechanics:
- Sensational content generates fast engagement
- High engagement reduces long-term trust stability
- Low trust creates volatile audience behavior
- Fact-checking costs time and reach
Why It Persuades:
Players feel why low-quality information systems can dominate healthy ones.
4. Water Scarcity — Allocation Protocol
Core Mechanic Inspiration: Hard ration + multi-system dependency
Game Idea:
Players manage water distribution across farming, housing, industry, and healthcare sectors during a long-term drought.
Persuasive Goal:
Show how infrastructure decisions create cascading human consequences.
Key Mechanics:
- Every system depends on water differently
- Cutting water creates delayed secondary crises
- Infrastructure upgrades take multiple turns to complete
- Emergency reserves create future shortages
Why It Persuades:
Players experience how infrastructure fragility creates social instability.
5. Food Ethics / Population Consumption — Protein Directive
(Light Soylent-style inspiration mechanically — population feeding efficiency vs ethics vs sustainability)
Core Mechanic Inspiration: Population processing efficiency optimization
Game Idea:
Players manage food production for a massive population using increasingly efficient but morally questionable food technologies.
Persuasive Goal:
Explore how efficiency pressure can lead to ethically uncomfortable systemic decisions.
Key Mechanics:
- Food sources vary by:
- Yield efficiency
- Public approval
- Long-term health outcomes
- Hidden system cost mechanics
- Population satisfaction vs survival tradeoff
Why It Persuades:
Players experience how large-scale systems reward efficiency over ethics.
Rewrite Endless Game Idea as Persuasive Game
Original Endless Game Concept
Endless resource accumulation / score growth game where the player continuously expands wealth and inventory with no natural stopping point.
Persuasive Version — Antique Tycoon
Concept:
Player runs an antique acquisition and resale empire, constantly buying, restoring, and flipping historical objects to grow profit and reputation.
Persuasive Message:
Cultural preservation and historical artifacts often become commodified, where monetary value can conflict with historical, ethical, or cultural value.
New Mechanics
Artifact Source System
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- Estate sales (ethical, low rarity)
- Private collectors (expensive, high authenticity)
- Gray market dealers (high rarity, ethical risk flags)
Historical Integrity Meter
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- Over-restoring items increases sale price
- But reduces historical authenticity score
- Museums and historians may blacklist player
Market Trend Pressure
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- Players pushed to sell historically important items during hype cycles
- Holding items preserves history but risks financial loss
Reputation Split System
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- Commercial Reputation → unlocks buyers and investors
- Preservation Reputation → unlocks grants, museum partnerships, academic value
Endless Growth Pressure
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- Rent, staff, and storage costs scale infinitely
- Forces constant acquisition and resale cycle
Players experience how markets can pressure owners to treat history as inventory.
The game does not tell players what is ethical or unethical; instead, it creates systems where players feel tension between preservation and profit.
The endless growth structure reinforces the idea that once a system is built around profit and expansion, it becomes difficult to slow down or prioritize non-financial values.
Reflection on Played Games
The McDonalds Game
The game is effective because it exposes hidden supply chain decisions through gameplay. Players quickly realize that maximizing profit requires making ethically questionable decisions somewhere in the system. The game persuades through player participation in the system rather than direct messaging.
Intergroup Monopoly
The game demonstrates systemic inequality by starting players with different rules and advantages. Instead of explaining inequality through text, it allows players to experience unfair systems directly, which creates a stronger emotional and cognitive understanding. Playing as a minority had me in jail most of the game, more aware of the games skew than other player may have been whilein play.
Cool Spot
This game works as an advergame because it prioritizes fun gameplay first and brand exposure second. Players build positive associations with the brand through repeated exposure during enjoyable gameplay rather than through forced advertising.
Reading Questions
From Chapter 1
How does Mary Flanagan’s definition of game differ from Chris Crawford’s and Salen & Zimmerman’s?
Mary Flanagan defines games more broadly as cultural tools that can be used to question social norms, explore values, and create critical reflection. Her focus is not just on what games are structurally, but what they can do culturally and politically. Chris Crawford focuses more on structural features like representation, interaction, conflict, and safety, treating games as designed systems with clear boundaries. Salen and Zimmerman are even more structurally focused, defining games as rule-based systems with artificial conflict and measurable outcomes. In short, Flanagan expands games into expressive and critical media, while the others focus more on formal system structure.
What is an activist game?
An activist game is designed to influence real-world thinking about social, political, or ethical issues. Instead of focusing only on entertainment, activist games attempt to raise awareness, encourage empathy, or prompt behavior change. These games often simulate systems or lived experiences so players can understand complex issues through participation rather than through passive learning.
From Chapter 3
What other games share perfect information besides Go and Chess?
Other perfect information games include Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers, Othello, Connect Four, and Nine Men’s Morris. In these games, all players can see the full game state at all times, and there are no hidden cards, secret information, or random chance affecting the game state.
Why might chance or gambling games hold spiritual or religious importance in ancient cultures?
Chance-based games were often connected to spiritual belief because randomness was interpreted as fate, divine will, or communication from supernatural forces. Tools like dice, bones, or casting lots were sometimes used for decision-making because outcomes were believed to reflect guidance from gods or spiritual powers rather than human choice.
When was the earliest battle between government or religious groups and games, and what modern games have been banned or demonized?
One early conflict involved religious condemnation of dice and gambling, which were often associated with sin or moral corruption. In more modern history, pinball was banned in several U.S. cities in the 1940s because it was considered gambling and a corrupting influence. Later, games like Dungeons & Dragons were demonized during the Satanic Panic, and some violent video games have faced bans or restrictions in certain countries due to concerns about violence or social influence.
What is a fox game, and what is a modern example?
A fox game refers to traditional asymmetric games like Fox and Geese, where one powerful player competes against many weaker players working together. The single player usually tries to eliminate opponents, while the group tries to trap or restrict the stronger player. Modern asymmetric multiplayer games follow similar structures, such as one-versus-many survival or hunter-versus-group game formats.
What was the purpose of The Mansion of Happiness?
The Mansion of Happiness was designed as a moral teaching game for children. It used movement along a path to represent moral progress, rewarding virtuous behavior and punishing immoral behavior. The game was meant to teach religious and social values through gameplay rather than direct instruction.
Why did Fluxus and Surrealist artists play games, and why did Surrealists think games might help everyone?
Surrealists used games to disrupt logical thinking and access subconscious creativity. They believed structured play could help people break free from social conditioning and rational constraints. Fluxus artists used games to challenge the boundaries between art and everyday life, often turning ordinary actions into artistic experiences and questioning what qualifies as art or performance.
Changes in what can signal profound changes in games, and how were pinball games reskinned during WWII?
Major changes in rules, goals, player roles, or scoring systems can signal deeper changes in how a game functions and what it represents. During World War II, some pinball machines were reskinned with patriotic or military imagery by replacing artwork, renaming machines, and repainting playfields to reflect wartime themes and cultural messaging.
What statements did Fluxus artists make by reskinning games like Monopoly and ping pong?
Fluxus artists used reskinned games to show that systems like capitalism, competition, and social structures are built on arbitrary rules that can be changed. By modifying familiar games, they encouraged players to question the assumptions behind everyday systems and think critically about power and structure.
How are artists like Lilian Ball, Marcel Duchamp, Takako Saito, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, and Ruth Catlow using war games?
These artists often use war game structures to critique power, conflict, and social systems. Some reinterpret strategic games like chess to explore culture, perception, and politics, while others modify competitive systems to explore cooperation, peace, or alternative social structures. By changing rules or presentation, they encourage players to rethink conflict and competition.
Why is player agency important in critical or serious games?
Player agency is important because critical games rely on player choice to create meaning. When players make decisions and experience consequences directly, they are more likely to reflect on the system being simulated. Without agency, a game becomes more like a lecture, but with agency, players participate in the argument the game is making.
