A couple of months ago I came across the Earth Journalism Awards, and a particular category caught my interest – the MTV Positive Change Award asked for no less than this:
“Enter the MTV Positive Change category of the competition, with your best, most original piece of content on climate change… We want you to express in whatever format you choose how our society is adapting, or needs to adapt, in response to the threat of climate change.”
The only constraint for this was a time limit of three minutes (and to be 18-28 years old, but that’s beside the point); the website therefore implies that applicants will be entering songs, short videos, essays etc. Naturally, I decided to make, and enter a game!
Due to the time constraint (and I do mean this in more ways than one), and because, well, it’s for MTV, I decided that a rhythm action game would be most appropriate. Thence, EarthBeat (cheesy working title, which stuck) was created:
Whilst it’s admittedly not the most mature game design (more a generic rhythm game reskinned, more or less) the intention was to take a game format that is famliar to a young, MTV-watching audience and turn it into a compelling, fun, and explicit commentary on climate change. The concept is that the player must “be in tune” with the Earth if we are to mitigate the effects of climate change, and hence hit the right ‘cues’ (things the player can do to be environmentally conscious) at the right time in order to lower carbon emissions. All this must be done within the time limit, as we do not have long to act to save the Earth. A key part of the procedural rhetoric is that idolness (simply doing nothing and ‘missing beats’) brings carbon emissions back up. If you’d like to play it yourself, you can download it here: (Windows, 6.04mb)
One of the more interesting parts of this whole process was actually submitting the game; despite the open-ended, explicit call for “creative pieces of media”, the submission form only really allowed for print, audio, or video. The only clear solution I could see was to just submit it under all three sections and hope for the best. I felt like such a rebel. However, this brought me back to the very reason I wanted to submit an entry to this competition in the first place: to challenge the mainstream media to think about games as an expressive medium, and because I think it’s important for us to be doing things like this. Well, let’s see how this little experiment goes, anyhow! Wish me luck.
Somewhat related to this post is that I finally read Frank Lantz’s recent article: Games Are Not Media (incidentally, after EarthBeat was done and dusted). You should definitely read the article to read the four assumptions about ‘games as media’ that Lantz says can make things troublesome. It does, however, seem that the prevailing intention of the article appears to be to challenge our usual definitions of media, and in this respect it is most useful.
Whilst we’re on this subject though, I guess I will raise the few points that I disagree with only slightly: saying that assumptions #1 and #2 (that games are brand new, and that games go in computers) problematic to the labelling of games as media seems itself problematic to me. I’d like to raise a counter assumption here: that video games are entirely comparable to non-digital games. This is something that seems rather prevalent amongst many game scholars, actually, though I would argue that there are clear distinctions that can be made of video games. This is particularly true when we’re evaluating video games as media: simply in terms of practicality, video games are, due to their very nature, far easier to distribute (and we have the fact that they ‘go in computers’ to thank for that). This makes them more suitable as a medium for mass public consumption than non-digital games. It’s the very reason that I could (very awkwardly) submit EarthBeat on an online entry form, after all. (Edit: I feel I should add in at least a nod to ‘Newsgames‘ in this post).
And, indeed, EarthBeat is intended as content to be consumed – to be played once, to make a statement. However, not all games are. As Lantz says: “games are not brand new, they don’t go in computers, they aren’t content that gets consumed, and they aren’t messages.”
This is absolutely true, and just goes to show how there are no universal truths when it comes to videogames; that is exactly what is so great, and also so troubling about them. And, in making us ask these questions, they can potentially challenge everything we think we already know about traditional linear media.
Pingback: FRANCISCO