I’m going to be volunteering at the upcoming Games for Change Festival and in the lead up to the festival itself, I thought interviewing some of the nominees for the Games for Change Awards would be a great window into what challenges people have faced in the design process.
My first interview was with Ralph Vacca of Seekchange.org who designed Fibber – A Game of Political Deception. The game takes the familiar quiz game format and asks players to try to assess whether statements made by Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are true or false.
The game was partly inspired by Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which loosened many of the restrictions on campaign ad spending. Vacca thought that the lead in to the coming election was a perfect time to get people to explore their own political biases as they will increasingly be facing more, and better financed ads from both sides of the aisle.
He talks about the challenges of creating a politically neutral game, what the games we design tell us about ourselves, and how CAPTCHAs inspired him to add a crowdsourcing component to his game.
WPG4C: Why did you create Fibber – A Game of Political Deception?
RV: We wanted to put a small twist on the long line of political quiz games and see if we could make a game that didn’t focus so much on whether or not people know X, Y or Z, but whether they would be willing to reflect on why they think they may or may not believe something to be true.
In short, we made this game because we’re obsessed with the idea of games being able to tell us something about ourselves as citizens, people, humans, lovers, gamers, etc.
WPG4C: How did you try to make the game politically balanced?
RV: Besides testing out the game with players from different political orientations and tweaking it based on feedback, from the onset we went in with the assumption that everyone is biased in how they filter and interpret political messages.
With that in mind we wanted to focus on gameplay that wouldn’t point out that one party or candidate was free from deception, but instead that we may want to be aware of our own biases that can impact how we deal with deceptive practices.
WPG4C: Could you tell me a bit more about “crowdsourcing deceptive statements”?
RV: Well one complaint we often hear about games for change is that there is no “real world action” taking place, which is obviously debatable. Anyway, we were inspired by Luis von Ahn and his work with re-CAPTCHA that re-purposed the task of CAPTCHAs so they could also help digitize books in addition to ensuring users are not bots but humans.
We again took a super simple approach to this question and asked ourselves if the decisions being made by players could be used somehow? The idea is that with enough players we could identify the most “effective” fibs – statements that people think are mostly true when they are mostly not – and use that information to spark discussions on Twitter.
In other words, if we have a bunch of players all pointing at the same statements that are mostly untrue, and saying they think they’re mostly true, could we use this to spark interesting discussions on Twitter?
WPG4C: What were the biggest challenges or obstacles you encountered during the process of making and publicizing the game?
RV: The biggest challenge was on this idea of deception itself. It was a big challenge to focus on statements that were more clearly mostly true/false rather than just opinions, and have that make sense to the player. We got a lot of push back from players on this issue, but the idea is to use that push back as part of the self-reflection process.
WPG4C: Who was your target audience for this game and why? Did you reach them and how?
RV: We wanted to target folks that are interested in politics and are at the same time curious about their own potential bias around how they interpret statements made by presidential candidates. Even though it’s a simple quiz game, we wanted to make it less like a trivia quiz and more like a Cosmo quiz where you might be prompted to ask yourself some questions, even at a simple level.
WPG4C: Is there anything else you’d like to add about the process of designing and promoting this game?
RV: We struggled with how to frame the goals and underlying algorithms to prompt reflection. In deciding to focus on “catching fibs” as part of the core mechanic, what does that say about our values as designers? What if the game focused instead mainly on “spotting truths” somehow?
The idea of stripping candidates also comes with the value of not taking politics so seriously; it can be a really comical space. Also the notion of using Twitter to prompt discussions comes with these values of prompting dialogue and believing it’s part of promoting change.