In my first post on this blog, I wrote that I’m not picky about what kind of change a game is trying to create. It’s terrific when a game tackles meaty, large-scale problems like global poverty or pollution, but that’s no reason to write off a game that operates at a more nitty gritty, interpersonal level, say one that gets people to have conversations with their kids about race, or pick up the phone and call a lonely stranger (like Jane McGonigal’s game Bounce).
That said I sometimes feel that the “change” aspect in certain games for change requires scare quotes. This is, of course, usually an issue of how the game is funded. For a number of reasons, games are often viewed as marketing vehicles rather than ends in themselves, and when that is the case with a game for change, it can add a certain disingenuousness to its purported social impact.
One example of this is a Facebook game called Trash Tycoon put out by the company Terracycle. For those of you who don’t know, Terracycle is actually a pretty neat company: they started off making worm poop fertilizer and expanded into upcycling packaging from other companies’ products into new goods. This includes collecting everything from old laptops and mp3 players to used wine corks and candy wrappers.
Trash Tycoon is a Farmville-style game in which you pick up different types of trash in a dirty city and create factories that can upcycle it into products that people can use. The fact that the game borrows so heavily from the Farmville vocabulary isn’t my main complaint, I understand that it can sometimes be easier to get people involved in a game when they’re familiar with the layout.
The real problem is that Trash Tycoon shares a feature of many other social media games: you have to pay if you want to play for very long. Whether your character runs out of energy or you need more composting worms, the almighty dollar is sure to interrupt your gameplay.
True 10% of all the money spent in the game goes to Carbonfund.org, and players can vote on which projects they would most like that money to support but a) this is not a very effective way to give to an environmental charity and b) to my mind this detracts from the supposed purpose of the game which is to raise awareness of upcycling (and of course to expose more people to the Terracycle brand).
When I played the game a couple of months ago, it was getting 100,000 monthly users. As of this posting, Facebook says that the game has 40,000 monthly users, which is still nothing to sneeze at. On the off chance that someone from Terracycle comes across this post, I’d like to propose some ways to breathe new life into the game, and take the scare quotes off its social impact in the process.
A chair made of corks. Hooray for upcycling!
So what would Trash Tycoon look like if its intended social impact wasn’t laden with raising brand awareness and bringing in revenue? It could be a hub for collaborative grassroots activism, bringing together people who want to change recycling laws or institute upcycling centers in their towns or cities.
An even more interesting possibility, and one that has less potential to threaten Terracycle’s bottom line, is to make a portion of the game where people can share ideas and tutorials for actual upcycling projects. Terracycle could even use this community as a way to crowdsource new product ideas that they could put into production.
These things would not necessarily be games in and of themselves but they would have to be built into the larger mechanics of Trash Tycoon. Not only would a game that looked like this have greater real world impact, but my suspicion is that it would keep players engaged longer because they would have greater agency.