Humane Games

• Gonzalo Frasca
  • September 12th
  • Madrid's visual poetry
    • Silences and absences that we attend to and give meaning to
    • Poetic concept of enjambment
• Free Rice
  • Real world impact is built into actual gameplay
• Darfur is Dying
  • Winner of MTVu's Digital for Darfur competition
  • Language suffers due to short development cycle
  • Lots of education through text rather than learning through play
  • Generally, many edutainment games reward success in gameplay with a pedantic title/text slide (Pork Invaders as an example)
• Brenda Brathwaite's Train
• Jason Rohrer's Passage
• The perceived crisis of innovation
  • Perhaps resulting from EA's dominance
  • Fear of saturation of the standard gaming market (14-35 year-old males)
  • EA's purchase of Maxis; forthcoming release of Spore
• Escape from Woomera
  
  • Breaking news through games
  • Exposed conditions at Australian immigration center
• Persuasive Games - Ian Bogost
  • On Colbert Report
• Rafael's experience at UTEP
  • 60% of students come from across the border each day
  • A "place-bound" school; if you can get out of El Paso, you would
• Crosser
  • Created by SWEAT game design collaborative
  • Developed on borrowed equipment with abandon-ware (Apple's Cocoa - eventually became Stagecast)
  • Game-like nature of immigration situation
  • Deploying "cute" as a strategy
  • Carlos Moreno, main character, tries to cross the border to get a green card
  • Frogger-like gameplay
  • No losing screen, but victory screen
• La Migra
  • Player is an INS officer driving around in a car; can shoot handcuffs to stop immigrants; goal is to keep as many immigrants out of the US as you can
  • Can win & lose
  • INS characters in the game reflect local population (INS is a good job in the region)
  • Unique background to each character
  • La Migra and Crosser are a dialectic (read Rafael Fajardo's essay on the two games for a longer description)
• Seeds of Solitude
  • Part of Juan and the Beanstalk universe of characters
  • Goal is to cut down the poppies before they overgrow the screen
• Fifa Fo Fum
  • Juan plays soccer against Pablo Escobar
  • Turns what is normally a victory (winning the soccer game) into a loss
  • Escobar's policy: "silver or lead" - either you accepted his silver or received his lead