On Jan 14, Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games rolled out Fatworld -- a digital work that illustrates the complex connections between health, class, economics, and politics, via the rhetoric of the sandbox game.
A sandbox game features open-ended play, with no single predetermined "winning" outcome. A target-shooting game such as Space Invaders forces the player to shoot waves of attacking enemies, because the game ends when the enemies encroach upon the player's position. By contrast, an open-ended game such as Sim City permits the player to decide whether the goal of the game is to create a thriving gridlocked metropolis, a road-free utopia. a network of hamlets insulated by forests, or an urban wasteland.
Fatworld presents a series of interconnected systems, such as a socio-economic model, a political model, and (the most complex in the game) a nutrition and health model. Playing Fatworld is a matter of figuring out how the game depicts connections between these systems.
The release of Fatworld seems perfectly timed, after McDonalds UK CEO Steve Easterbrook, ruminating on the causes of childhood obesity, noted last week that "there's fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past they'd have been burning off energy outside."
Bogost is an accomplished games scholar and proponent of what the field in general calls "serious games." His studio produced the Howard Dean for Iowa game, and has provided editorial material to the New York Times in the form of "newsgames" (a cross between a game and a political cartoon) such as Food Import Folly.
His book Unit Operations introduces a universal method for analyzing texts from literary works to video games, and this week students in my Video Game Theory and Culture class are reading his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
Knowing Ian was behind Fatworld, I had high hopes. I really, really wanted to like it much better than I do.
I wanted to write a review that discusses the game's educational potential, its elegance, and its rhetorical effectiveness at using the game format to communicate a message about health (and politics, economics, and lifestyle).
I wanted to say I loved the isometric cuteness of the game world, and that the puffy menu bars and the bloated cartoon hand that serves as the mouse pointer fit wonderfully with the theme of the game. I wanted to praise the Govern O Mat, where you can select food-related legislation and click the "Bribe" button to influence a politician. I wanted to try to work restaurant review clichés into my review.
I did not want to do what I'm about to do instead -- bellyache about a confusing interface that violates basic UI principles; puzzle over displays with unexplained readouts that never change and clocks that count up by increments of four and down by increments of two (why?); grumble about design flaws that make mini-games unnecessarily confusing; and grouse about bugs that make minigames cut off abruptly for no reason.
A sandbox game features open-ended play, with no single predetermined "winning" outcome. A target-shooting game such as Space Invaders forces the player to shoot waves of attacking enemies, because the game ends when the enemies encroach upon the player's position. By contrast, an open-ended game such as Sim City permits the player to decide whether the goal of the game is to create a thriving gridlocked metropolis, a road-free utopia. a network of hamlets insulated by forests, or an urban wasteland. Fatworld presents a series of interconnected systems, such as a socio-economic model, a political model, and (the most complex in the game) a nutrition and health model. Playing Fatworld is a matter of figuring out how the game depicts connections between these systems.
The release of Fatworld seems perfectly timed, after McDonalds UK CEO Steve Easterbrook, ruminating on the causes of childhood obesity, noted last week that "there's fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past they'd have been burning off energy outside."
Bogost is an accomplished games scholar and proponent of what the field in general calls "serious games." His studio produced the Howard Dean for Iowa game, and has provided editorial material to the New York Times in the form of "newsgames" (a cross between a game and a political cartoon) such as Food Import Folly.
His book Unit Operations introduces a universal method for analyzing texts from literary works to video games, and this week students in my Video Game Theory and Culture class are reading his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
Knowing Ian was behind Fatworld, I had high hopes. I really, really wanted to like it much better than I do.
I wanted to write a review that discusses the game's educational potential, its elegance, and its rhetorical effectiveness at using the game format to communicate a message about health (and politics, economics, and lifestyle). I wanted to say I loved the isometric cuteness of the game world, and that the puffy menu bars and the bloated cartoon hand that serves as the mouse pointer fit wonderfully with the theme of the game. I wanted to praise the Govern O Mat, where you can select food-related legislation and click the "Bribe" button to influence a politician. I wanted to try to work restaurant review clichés into my review.
I did not want to do what I'm about to do instead -- bellyache about a confusing interface that violates basic UI principles; puzzle over displays with unexplained readouts that never change and clocks that count up by increments of four and down by increments of two (why?); grumble about design flaws that make mini-games unnecessarily confusing; and grouse about bugs that make minigames cut off abruptly for no reason.
Continue reading Fatworld Review.
