Courtesy of the GDC Vault is another free video from its extensive archive of recorded GDC sessions.
This time, Wired's Shannon Perkins discusses how his game Cutthroat Capitalism managed to educate its players without being manipulative in "Faster Cheaper Better: Deeply Integrated Game Mechanics."
Speakers: Shannon Perkins
Track / Format: Gamification Day / Lecture
Overview: Shannon Perkins, editor of Interactive Technology at Wired.com, designed Cutthroat Capitalism for Wired's website and received accolades for it's ability to engage and teach. In this session, he will discuss games with educational, editorial, or persuasive objectives do not need to include leaderboards or badges, they don't need be to crassly manipulative, and they don't need to feel like an after-thought.
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I remember playing this a day or two after it came out. Somali pirates were in the news quite a bit in the weeks leading up to the release of that game.
To a certain extent, I think this game rides the wave of pirate internet memes that are out there. Internet pirates and pirate political parties and "Arrrr!" speak like a pirate day and then throw in REAL pirates in the 21st century and a South Park episode and what do you get? A rediculous, farce of a game about a real and serious and complex issue that you'd expect to find floating around on Facebook but not on Wired.com.
The South Park episode did more to put the piracy phenomenon into context than this game did. The jesters of the world are somehwat more honest and willing to guide us through to the unanswered philosophical and socio-economic questions that remain than our journalists are these days.
So it's a game and many kids have found their way to playing it I'm sure... what is it they are learning from rediculous games like this? The title "Cutthroat Capitalism" itself along with the gameplay seem to mock the Somali pirates as being primitive capitalists and that by contrast western capitalism represents some kindler gentler refined ultimate evolution of the practice. That is the subtext and that's what most folks are going to walk away with for having played this "game" and that's what makes this more like propoganda than anything journalistic.
So i disagree with the title of this gama article re: educating without manipulation.
The Wired game plays on our conditioned romantic notion of pirates as being simple criminals solely motivated by greed.
http://gdcvault.com/play/1016608/Faster-Cheaper-Better-Deeply-Integrated
To a certain extent, I think this game rides the wave of pirate internet memes that are out there. Internet pirates and pirate political parties and "Arrrr!" speak like a pirate day and then throw in REAL pirates in the 21st century and a South Park episode and what do you get? A rediculous, farce of a game about a real and serious and complex issue that you'd expect to find floating around on Facebook but not on Wired.com.
The South Park episode did more to put the piracy phenomenon into context than this game did. The jesters of the world are somehwat more honest and willing to guide us through to the unanswered philosophical and socio-economic questions that remain than our journalists are these days.
So it's a game and many kids have found their way to playing it I'm sure... what is it they are learning from rediculous games like this? The title "Cutthroat Capitalism" itself along with the gameplay seem to mock the Somali pirates as being primitive capitalists and that by contrast western capitalism represents some kindler gentler refined ultimate evolution of the practice. That is the subtext and that's what most folks are going to walk away with for having played this "game" and that's what makes this more like propoganda than anything journalistic.
So i disagree with the title of this gama article re: educating without manipulation.
The Wired game plays on our conditioned romantic notion of pirates as being simple criminals solely motivated by greed.