Notice how I didn't use "Why so serious" instead.
So Screen Australia is working with the ABC to support Educational/Training games and present it to a wider, public audience.
Being a gamer myself it seems like a bit of a toss up, mixing education and entertainment is like baking fish in cake; it hasn't appealed to me in the past and after working on an assignment relevant to said 'serious games' in highschool it's not an easy thing to pull off. Since that's the case the scale ends up either leaning towards education more, making the game a chore and no more fun that listening to a monotone lecturer talk about various types of plastic, or entertainment more at which case you don't learn anything. There's the issue of getting the 'message' across, which is obviously the crux of the whole scheme; doing that inside interactive entertainment doesn't really sound plausible.
Why? Well, being a gamer I've come to criticize games in the past for elements; those being story, graphics, sound, and other deeper things, etc. Plenty of past video games solely based on entertainment have wrapped up a message in all of its programming and visuals, true, but those are generally morals. Morals and Education are two very different things so try not to get them confused. Anyway; looking from a particular artistic standpoint, Interactive Entertainment is the most difficult medium to manipulate and bring together successfully as there are so many other mediums that need to be focused on in the process (Many would disagree as IE is still an emerging form of art, go watch 'The Most Powerful Person in the World'* if you do). Fixing education into it? making it a hit so that its purpose is actually fulfilled? Encouraging more of the same edutainment products to be developed? It's like you've taken the most difficult medium and turned it impossible.
You can't force feed someone certain information if they're not interested; majority of gamers could likely cut out the message in favor of entertainment, or not purchase the game all together. That involves both the core and casual market. Core: Obviously there for bragging rights, they'd prefer competition and challenge with a hemmoragingly deep story to get engrossed in over being bugged by the worlds typical issues that they're bombarded with every day. Casual: Similar deal, they're purely playing video games for the short burst of entertainment their mind requires just to get a break from the nag of reality. Try seeing it as traveling to another planet and attempting to mind control a heard of moose like aliens. You're targeting a poorly researched audience with a still emerging medium, good luck.
You might be seeing the quote "At least we know the message has been received by some people" in the future. This just turns the idea on its head, for me, as it's wasted time and resources which could have been spent on other more practical ways to get the message across; the same time and resources that could have been placed into actual Health and Safety, money that would be better off pushed into the current economic and environmental crisis. I won't tap into politics too much as it's a subject I'm clearly ignorant of, but I do understand that any support towards said crisis is support spent well rather than winging it on assumption with some other lackluster idea.
Then there's the other half of me which hopes this actually hits home and changes the world, at which case I'll likely stop blowing crap out of proportions.
*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUbyMxSfSs4
You know Stan Lee agrees, and he supported comics when they were emerging and considered a childish form of entertainment with no orthodox methods of art anywhere to be found. Notice the pattern? (This part was out of the way so I didn't stray from the main topic, but I had to give an honorable mention)
Monday, March 23, 2009
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