Social Impact Games

Social Impact Games are created to address varied societal challenges. Future innovations in social impact game design are likely to come through the researchers and practitioners that not only make such games, but shape the way we design, develop, employ, and apply social impact games. This opinion piece emphasizes the idea that reactive research chases the future, but innovative research shapes it. It outlines threats to the practice, including antisocial impact games (contrasted with prosocial design), technological durability, and shifts in ludo literacy. It concludes with opportunities, based on historical contexts, to develop ethical standards for social impact game design, increase inclusivity and improved efficacy. From this perspective, the past indicates a future where the work of social impact matures out of research experiment toward everyday experiences among the milieu of interactive media.

Social Impact Games are created to address varied societal challenges. It’s a practice that has matured, growing wider in its scope, global in its creation, and increasingly complex in its aims. It is no longer a surprising solution to create games that aim to help shape our empathies (e.g., Urban Ministry of Durham’s PlaySpent.org), improve patient behaviors (e.g., Hopelab’s Remission), or create complex social shifts like inoculating players from disinformation (e.g., Harmony Square or Factitious). Sometimes these games are the product of focused research in social impact, others are the result of entertainment applied in the right context like Assassin’s Creed Discover Tour.

However, the future of applied gaming, including the development of social impact games, needs to move beyond chasing validation and towards shaping efficacy. Reactive research chases the future, innovative research shapes it.

Future innovations in social impact game design are likely to come through the researchers and practitioners that not only make such games, but shape the way we design, develop, employ, and apply social impact games. The future is not only application, but process, including enhancements in the who and how of such games.

In the next five years, our hope is that this work will start to expand across more geographic dispersed communities, employing participatory design and increased leadership from the communities best served by such a world. Just as the history of games experienced a proliferation of alternative game experiences precipitated from the democratizing forces of indie gaming, it’s reasonable to expect the same forces are already shaping the future of social impact games. Instead of reacting to market forces, the community of social impact game makers can shape its future. That may mean not only ascribing to known processes but defining ones that are unique to social impact games.

What economists identify as emerging markets are quickly employing social impact games to highlight distinct elements of their cultures, to shape conversations about a variety of societal issues and even explore solutions. In 2022 alone, I was invited to speak with growing communities of social impact design in Turkey, Malaysia, and Abu Dhabi. These are communities building entrepreneurial momentum through Abu Dhabi Gaming, Biji-biji Initiative Malaysia, and educational growth at institutions like Bahçeşehir University. This work happens from multicultural perspectives that expand the aims, reach, and methods of creating social impact.

However, this future also comes with its own caveats. Just as the forces of a proverbial good are working to improve the world, the opportunity to turn such forces against social benefit pose a threat. With every great invention comes the responsibility to diminish its negative effect on society, while aiming its strengths toward the positive. Often in the context of technological innovation, we fail to do this due diligence. We race to unleash the democratizing forces of social media, without asking how it might shape our daily experience in negative ways. We at once praise social media for its ease in connecting communities or building citizen protest but condemn it for seeding unreliable information and stirring social envy. In software we build systems that are easily exploited by bad actors, without thinking critically about what long term effects such exploits may have. Social impact games are not immune to this zealous innovation, which champions benefit without weighing cost. In short, if there is any space within applied game design that should be thinking about long term effect and the threat of detrimental actions, it’s social impact game design. The term is not always obviously toward prosocial benefit. As such, I fear that the ten-year horizon for social impact games may likely include a combination of prosocial and antisocial impact games. Games that may have even started as one and become the other. Just as some social media platforms, or game social networks, have been poisoned by malicious intent.The simplest way to mitigate against this threat is to encourage a kind of ludo literacy that is as fundamental as education in numeracy, language literacy, or visual literacy. This means that as the game medium becomes increasingly pervasive, we develop an awareness of the rhetorical elements of the work. While such an education evolves as the society employs it, there is a fundamental jurisprudence that keeps such work pro-social.

Just as Artificial Intelligence is coming to terms with a code of ethics, it’s reasonable to expect a code of ethics in rhetorical persuasive media within the then-year horizon. Ideally, I imagine such a code of ethics may be the equivalent of Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics. A simple, safe philosophical structure that respects the medium’s strengths and weaknesses.This requires another potential future for the practice. While game design has had a history of championing the leadership of individual game designers, it’s obvious that the continued pattern of small innovations across distinct academic and professional communities limits the medium’s potential. The state of social impact games is analogous to the first 30 years of any nascent industry, from the first personal computer tinkerings of the Homebrew computer club to the first efforts at eSports competitions or the creation of games by a mere few engineers. What I’ve witnessed in many similar enterprises is a simple pattern. In the beginning there are many small innovators who find distinct innovations and build foundational work. In the end, the scale, impact, and opportunity turn a rhizome into trees, lending shadow to some and increasing the light on others. A variety of forces leave the ColecoVision in the shadow of the Atari 2600, the Reader Rabbit eclipsed by the longevity of the Oregon Trail. Similarly, the future of social impact games may not rest in academic lab-grown games that persist just long enough for the controlled study and resulting publication. It may not last in the solo designs I myself have done, or that designers like Lucas Pope have so masterfully done with games like Paper’s Please and Republia Times. Solo designer developers struggle to produce the scale, if impact and entertainment, offered by the larger teams between widely successful games like Plague, Inc, or Strange Loop’s Eco.Industry leaders and researchers recognize that reach and efficacy are shaped by longevity. The real impact is about archival, long-lasting technologies. It may take years to demonstrate efficacy or to integrate such games into curricula. In those years, game engines change and browser support shifts. Longevity often means more than simply building and realizing, but maintaining. These mean more than a set of loosely affiliated faculty, but instead, the formation of long-lasting partnerships and large-scale games that are parts of suites. The long trajectory for social impact games is likely to look more like an integrated operating system, with lots of little solutions to a myriad of problems, than a suite of bespoke solutions nuanced. This also likely means the solo designer-dev gives way to larger and larger groups creating more complex game systems across wider demographics, technographics, and psychographics.It is reasonable to expect that social impact games evolve toward mainstream entertainment, in much the way the documentary form or military media industrial complex persist in film and television. Such experiences rest among our formerly escapist media, bringing positive and negative social impact to an audience’s understanding of the world around them. The past indicates a future where the work of social impact matures out of research experiment and cottage industries, toward everyday experiences among the milieux of interactive media.

For some of us that means games substituting the biases of standardized tests and personal interviews with through game-based assessments, like Education Testing Service’s Awkward Annie. For others, it means playful, explorable explanations, like vi Hart and Nicky Case’s Parable of the Polygons. Yet others envision pervasive human computation games like FoldIt.

Most importantly, the future of social impact games will be shaped by the innovators who are able to write the standard by which social impact follows a moral and philosophical good. The standard to which others will be held, of the compass that points toward a true north. The future will be shaped by those who are able to bring communities together to build wider, deeper, more persistent impact from an inevitably increasingly multidisciplinary medium. To those who help move social impact forward, it is important to recognize and address pitfalls as inevitable challenges toward any worthwhile exploration.

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