There are few games that use the gaming medium as the powerful force of change that it can be.

Currently, there exists a diverse selection of games that someone could choose to play: from simple platformers about heroes saving princesses to first person shooters about gangster rap on Venus. Yet, this diversity is extremely constrained to subjects that ultimately do not matter. Where are the games about social anxiety, dropping out of college, falling in love, losing your parents or feeling jealousy? There is a whole array of experiences that are common to most human beings that are not being explored by the medium. There is also very little discussion (through games) about global issues that are relevant today, such as global warming, consumerism, privacy or hunger and poverty. How amazing would be it for a game to clearly show the relations between people’s lives and world starvation? How buying an iPhone affects underage workers in China? Or how not caring about things that don’t affect your daily life (such as the NSA spying issue) can lead to decreased freedom of expression and freedom of choice?

There is a prevalent idea among game developers that games are supposed to be fun. Most players agree with this notion, but it doesn’t mean that games have to be devoid of any humanly or globally relevant subjects. It’s not a binary situation, an either/or type of deal. Games can be interesting to play and at the same time explore issues deeply (Papers, Please is a great example), but this takes effort and risk. The chance that people will not understand what is being said, the chance that a game won’t be financially successful, the chance of being called “pretentious”… And so, collectively, game developers choose to go for an easier path of certainty and fun. Quoting Alan Moore:

In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

The gaming medium has the unique capacity for making certain feelings emerge in the player, and therefore has a higher capacity for empathy and projection. Game developers should abuse this uniqueness more. The industry (especially the indie scene) shouldn’t strive for dealing only in fun, but also in experiences. Fun is not the only thing you experience in life. So why should fun be the only thing that you experience in games? There’s a great podcast episode about this on the Infinite Ammo podcast. It’s episode 20 with Kayla Kinnunen and (if you wanna skip) it starts at 1h 43m 30s. And there’s also a great talk about this from Jonathan Blow (he’s immensely better and more organized in his thoughts and in the way he makes his points than me, so watch it!):

Drain

With all that said, for this Ludum Dare I decided to make a game that talked about population growth, consumerism and global warming. The idea is pretty simple: there is a planet (where gameplay takes place), there are resources and there are beings. Beings need resources to not disappear and to reproduce. The goal of the game is for society to thrive (have lots of beings alive at the same time) before the world becomes too poluted or before there aren’t enough beings alive for it to be feasible that that society survives.

The goal that I had as a designer was to make sure that the game made it possible for people to more easily see the relations between the three topics I wanted to talk about: population growth, consumerism and global warming. I think I managed to do this in a number of ways:

• A being connected to no resources will eventually disappear, saying that if people don’t consume things they cease to exist (this can be interpreted (in my head at least) in two ways: directly, people who don’t eat will die or indirectly, people who don’t consume objects are not, in a way, part of today’s consumption based society).

• When a being connects to a resource the being grows larger, and if a being is too large it creates another being. This says that people need resources to create more people and that, if that new person doesn’t want to die, they will also need to consume resources.

• When a being connects to a resource, the resource grows smaller, and if the resource is too small it will disappear. This says that resources are not infinite and that people consume them in order to survive.

So far the points made are pretty obvious, but at the same time it’s nice that there is a clear way of stating those obvious truths about life on earth as gameplay mechanics. Using those obvious facts as a base, I suddenly can say more complicated and nuanced things (much like you can start from axioms and go on to prove all sorts of crazy stuff in some mathematical system):

• When too many beings are connected to one resource a city is created. This city randomly spawns more resources and beings. This tries to talk about how having some reserve of resources can bring more people together to some specific place (basically how the rise of agriculture (renewable resources) led to the rise of population centers).

• Growing your population to the final goal of n beings means that pretty much all resources in the planet need to be used, that some beings will overuse some resources (and therefore some other beings will be deprived of that resource) and that the planet becomes a complicated mess of connections everywhere that makes it harder to see what’s actually happening (much like we fail to see the connections between our lives and the environment).

• Many beings die because the player simply didn’t have enough time to get to all of them, since they start becoming smaller (and therefore harder to click) as they go on without being connected. This talks about how sometimes (or most of the time) the problem isn’t much about resource consumption but about resource distribution.

• The more time goes on, the higher the number of beings you need for your society to thrive. This talks about how complexity and specialization of labor in our society makes it so that there is a higher amount of knowledge (and therefore people) needed for us to maintain life at our current levels of comfort.

• The more time goes on, the darker the map gets. This talks about global warming/pollution. The more those people are there consuming resources, the more they’re producing waste and changing the environment.

And so, with those simple rules I said some pretty interesting things about the world. People who weren’t aware of those things before may become aware after playing the game, and hopefully they’ll start changing their actions so that they more closely reflect this new knowledge. This probably doesn’t happen that much (it’s hard to imagine that everyone who played it got all that from the game), but it’s nice to imagine that someone got it and that that someone changed their opinions or actions about one or more of the subjects talked about in the game,
as that is the ultimate goal: being a force of change for good in society.

What Went Right

• Presentation was not bad. I’m not an artist at all, but I managed to make basic shapes look rather interesting. My inspiration came from this game:

• Gameplay was simple, I had enough time to finish it and make it visually interesting. Contrary to past Ludum Dares, where I chose an idea that was way too complicated, barely managed to finish it and had no time for “details” (making it visually pleasing, play test, tutorial, sounds, etc…).

• Some guy wrote an article about the game. This really caught me by surprise because I wasn’t particularly pleased with the game (it really isn’t that fun to play and the main mechanic isn’t that interesting either, despite having a good message), but apparently games with strong messages resonate a lot with people, so that’s pretty interesting to learn!

• With only two sounds I created a pretty fitting and good mood for the game. The heart beat makes sure the player is connected to the beating planet, beings and resources (they all have a very visible “beating” effect to them), and the background noise makes sure that there is a slight sense of urgency (at least in my head) present.

• I managed to make a reaaaaally decent tutorial (probably even better than the game itself). Compared to other Ludum Dares, where I gave no instructions whatsoever.

What Went Wrong

• Bad camera controls. I didn’t have enough time to test the game with other people, so while I knew that the camera controls weren’t good, I sort of pushed it down the stack of things to do and in the end forgot to pop everything. Lately I’ve been trying to avoid doing this and getting to problems/bugs as they happen instead of pushing them for later (in a depth manner instead of breadth), but it’s hard sometimes.

• The game isn’t fun. I said that games don’t *need* to be fun, but it’s better if they are at least a bit engaging/challenging/fun. My game doesn’t have any of that. It’s simply there to be played once/twice and to make a point. I know that games about connecting things can be engaging (because I’ve played similar ones, even though they ultimately had very different mechanics), but I didn’t have enough time to figure out how to make that in two days…

Lessons Learned

• Presentation matters A LOT. Make sure your game is visually pleasing. I’m a terrible artist, but I managed to make something that is kinda OK to look at by simply playing with tweens and alphas. Make sure to try out lots of different ways of drawing simple shapes so that you always have some tricks that make your game stand out a bit.

• Meaningful messages resonate strongly with some people. Even though your game will probably not be of massive appeal if it’s about depression, it will resonate very strongly with people who are/were depressed. So in a competition like Ludum Dare, don’t be afraid to talk about subjects that aren’t of massive appeal. People are forced to play and rate your game, so it’s a more concrete way of ensuring your message will be heard by at least a few people.

• Experience! I’ve been programming games pretty much every day for this past year, so it stands to reason that I have more to pull from when I have to participate in competitions, which ultimately means that it’s easier for me to get something “good” out there. So the more games you make, the better your next games will be (if you challenge yourself, of course).

Conclusion

This was a pretty fun one. I’ve seen lots of games that are really interesting and polished. The one thing that always bothers me about LDs is how nice people are. People have a huge tendency of not pointing out obvious issues and only focusing on positive feedback. You can’t do anything with positive feedback other than feel good for a while. You can only improve through “good bad” feedback, the type that points out your mistakes and ways to solve them. So, don’t be afraid to be a bit negative sometimes. If you can see an obvious way to improve someone’s game, say it! If someone can’t handle getting criticized then they won’t improve, and if they don’t want to improve then why participate in the competition in the first place? Why even be alive if you’re not levelling up? why even bother playing games when you will just die and forget them