I really enjoyed playing the game “Bad News”. I thought that while it was clearly intended to be satirical, it had some elements that are clearly relevant to the time we live in now, where information (and misinformation) can spread so quickly, and people are able to form opinions just as quickly. The game was specifically targeted at Twitter, which is probably the site where it is easiest to post and share misinformation, especially by simply sharing a title of an article that is meant to clickbait users into forming a strong opinion just from a few words of the title.
I obviously couldn’t play the redistricting game due to flash player being disabled, but I have in the past. From what I remember though, it was a good representation of what happens in politics for the process of drawing up districts in such a way that the voting tendencies of a certain population in a district favor one specific candidate.
These 2 games are just part of the discussion about whether video games can be used as an effective tool to cause social change. In the case of these two games, they seem like they were meant to be used specifically for the purpose of exposing and somewhat making fun of, in a way, of what goes on in their respective situations. However, while it made the games a little more interesting to play by trying to make fun of certain situations, I don’t know if they can help facilitate social change while trying to play off the situation as a humorous matter but also making fun of one side of the argument.
Although the 2 games mentioned might not be the best means of sparking change, I think that some video games are much better suited to doing so. While I don’t necessarily think that games are a great source of creating change, I do think that they can be used as a secondary source. Most games are not created specifically to address a social issue, but they can be classified as a form of art, and as such, many games have underlying messages that can be applied to a wide variety of different topics in the world.
A counter point to the positive discussions that games can start is that they also can inspire plenty of negative points as well. One of the main type of games that has been under fire recently is violent games, specifically shooter games like Call of Duty. Many people use these games to blame the games for the increase of violent acts, specifically in the United States. Could this be the case? Absolutely, the easy access to these games can desensitize people to violence, but I personally think that it is far from the only reason why things like that are happening.
