Ian Bogost Dished on The Colbert Report

I'm pretty jazzed about what Georgia Institute of Technology Assistant Professor Ian Bogost is up to these days with his Persuasive Games consulting/development project (see my review of Food Import Folly). Okay, you pick up his latest book (also called Persuasive Games) and it's still a little heavy with the theory (though it does drop most of the unnecessary in-crowd jargon that plagued his prior uber-treatise, Unit Operations).

But its hook? Fascinating. Bogost wants to harness interactive entertainment for more than just tooling around in fantasy la-la land. Let the wonks have their Civ 4s and Age of Empires 3s, but why not also casual games that make engaging everything from food inspection to oil economics more...well, frankly more entertaining. Get over your Puritan-esque pleasure-guilt -- having fun while learning is hardly "entertaining yourself to death," (where studying socio-politically irrelevant nobodies like Paris Hilton, on the other hand, is). How about a game that deals with China's treasury bond threats against the U.S. dollar? The international political and economic factors post-global catastrophe in terms of responsibility, cooperation, bureaucracy, and aid management? Cultural collisions (and compromises) when global economies collide?

Put it another way: Two people communicate, each attempting to bring the other around to their side of an issue. To the degree either is successful, a particular world view is reinforced. Nothing special about that, right? Common sense? Rally enough people to your cause and presto-bammo, change the world. Visual art, music, books, they all extend rhetorical discourse....so why not video games? Think about expression. Think about simulations of real or imagined systems. Think about inviting people to interact with and react to those systems.

Now stop thinking and have some fun with Professor Bogost on Monday's edition of The Colbert Report.

And if you want to have a go at the game he mentions, here's Oil God.

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