I attended the Symposium Explores the Use of Digital Games by Human Rights Activists on October 10 and found it to be somewhat interesting.
The first person who spoke was Susana Ruiz who is the co-founder of Take Action Games. She explained that Take Action Games transverses the interactions of art, activism, ethics, and documentary. Their first large-scaled game was called Darfur is Dying. The game was endorsed by MTV U in 2006 to spread awareness.
The point of the game was to “foster empathy” amongst players, as Ruiz put it. It is to see how long you can keep the camp safe. Its look is similar to that of FarmVille on Facebook, which had a very large following shortly after Darfur Is Dying was released. Darfur Is Dying immediately had 700,000 players in its first month. The relevance in 2006 was very strong, however Darfur is barely talked about now and yet it has more than 3.5 million players. The impressive thing about Darfur Is Dying apart from its number of players is that it engaged non-gamers. Many people who don’t normally play video games were very active in the game and worked hard to keep the camps safe.
Another game was set up to display gender stereotyping and teen abuse called RePlay. After RePlay, Take Action Games worked on an app called Not Your Baby, which had a large following. Then they produced Say No-Unite, which spreads U.N. Reports through the game which can be played as an app or on the computer. Ruiz and her company found that not many people read the U.N. reports worldwide, so this was a good medium of putting useful, important, and factual information out there in the digital world.
Take Action Games works on a lot of proactive games, currently concentrating on card games, despite having a digital game background. The card games, also based on documentaries on prominent figures worldwide, are meant to provoke meaningful conversation. It is supposed to connect you to the documentary. It is only a prototype now, but the video that Ruiz showed was very interesting.
Another speaker at the lecture was Angel David Nieves who works for Digital Humanities Initiative. The main gear for DHI is their interactive game SOWETO Historical, which stands for South Western Townships. These South Western townships are located in South Africa and hold place for women to speak about their experiences of living.
There are several representative avatars of actual people in the region in South Africa. The program also had 3D maps that the user can sift through to see the actual site, which is directly related to the SOWETO.
Since gaming is not particularly related to my interest or field, the lecture was somewhat interesting, but I found more of a connection to Ruiz’s point and productivity than Nieves’.
It’s interesting to see where gaming will end up because as they said 2006 in the gaming world is eons ago. So what is the next step and what will people want to do with their game time?