“Why can't Call of Duty actually be about duty?” This was the question posed by Ubisoft computer game designer Clint Hocking at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. He voiced the growing frustration held by mainstream designers that their industry is trapped in a kind of perpetual adolescence. Game boys want to grow up and real world issues – genocide, poverty, conservation and the like – are increasingly seen as viable content and a right of passage towards a mature industry.
Ethical games with titles like Darfur is Dying, Escape From Woomera and World Without Oil wear their politics firmly on their sleeves. But can they raise awareness while scoring big with gamers and even possibly turn a profit? Talk to industry experts like Justin Halliday, who co-produced Escape from Woomera and he’ll tell you that only 12 percent of computer games are actually violent in nature. It’s an encouraging statistic. “Unfortunately that 12 percent accounts for over 75 percent of the market,” he laments. “If you look at the successful games – outside of licensed properties like Harry Potter – almost everything else is based on violence, and I think it’s kind of sad.”
The general decline in interest in all things political didn’t go unnoticed by Suzanne Seggerman. She saw the lack of civic engagement and newspaper readership among younger generations as good reason to found Games for Change in 1997. The organization provides visibility and resour...
