Journal Wk12: Serious games

Dafur is Dying: The most striking message for me is that even though the game tries to recreate the situation, I’m still just an outsider sitting on a far away computer. I thought that the gameplay was very effective in delivering the message – getting water for the village was very hard, until I used the youngest character.

DriverSeat: The message of this game is that senior drivers can be less agile on the road. I understand that the goal of the game was make the player feel the impairments that afflict senior drivers, but I can’t tell if the gameplay actually conveys the impairments or just suffers from bad design.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG: I couldn’t get very far in the game as I kept getting busted by the cameras and hall monitors, but I think that the message was to provide an insight into what caused the shootings, as opposed to the outside view we get from traditional media.

Oiligarchy: The message is to show a battle of greed vs resources and how easy it is to deplete those. I thought the gameplay was very effective here: after setting up a few drills, it just got even easier to setup even more to the point that I was draining all the oil wells available, money was not a problem even when activists started destroying my plants. I eventually caused the Last World War and the planet was destroyed.