People who are interested in "serious hypertexts" go to Eastgate.com. However, there is no such a place for those who look for "serious videogames". There may be many reasons for this lack of videogames that convey original ideas, foster critical thinking and deal with social, philosophical and/or political topics. Certainly, there is not a big market for such content in traditional media but there might be other structural and cultural causes that could explain why mainstream videogames do not combine play with "serious" topics.

Historically, games have been disregarded as trivial because of their non-productive use of time and material resources. However, the main reason why videogames do not represent complex, adult situations may reside on the fact that they trivialize actions because of their multiple outcomes. For example, the only videogames that deal with the Holocaust are neo-nazi games. Why did anybody make a humanist Holocaust videogame? The reason may be that such a game could be even scarier than the racist one. A videogame where Anna Frank could die or survive depending on the player's performance would not only be historically inaccurate, but would also trivialize the value of human life.

This seems trivial mainly because most videogames are interpreted through a narrative paradigm. Narrative generally serves as a statement. A videogame where a concentration camp prisoner may or may not die is not stating humanist values. The object of narrative is the fait accompli: the actions that have already happened in the past (even if they are narrated as if they were happening now). While the computer can obviously serve as a medium for narrative, its true potential is in simulation (the act of modeling the behavior of a complex system through a simpler system). Narrative is about what happened; simulation is about what could happen.

While simulations seem to be the obvious option for delivering more open-ended content, modeling human and social behavior is not an objective task. As simulations move from fantasy-based environment towards models that are closer to real life and deal with humans (such as The Sims, Sim City or Babyz) rather than monsters, their ideological bias becomes more evident.

In his study on race in cyberspace, anthropologist Julian Bleeker pointed out how Sim City 2000 avoided racial elements as part of the urban simulation dynamics. In a similar trend, several critics have pointed out the clear consumerist agenda behind The Sims's behavior. In Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle brilliantly describes how people respond to simulations. Some suffer from what she calls "simulation denial": they reject them as representational tools because simulations offer a simplified view of the source system. By "simulation resignation" she identifies the behavior of those who identify simulation limitations -notably ideological bias, such as the one described by Bleeker- but accept them because the system does not allow modifying them. However, Turkle imagines a third possible kind of relationship created by simulations that would "actually help players challenge the model's built-in assumptions. This new criticism would try to use simulation as a means of consciousness-raising."

The natural approach for building this third kind of simulation would probably be constructivism, which has extensively studied the relationship between education and simulation. However, because constructivism has mainly dealt with science education, the ideological baggage of its building blocks has not been so evident. Seymour Papert envisioned microworlds as simulated environments where children could experiment with mathematics and physics, two activities that are generally far away from racial or political issues. If Logo had been designed to explore, say, social policies, the choice of its turtle would have been probably questioned (Why a turtle and not a cat? Why green? Why not a handicapped turtle?).

There is an alternative pedagogical approach that, even if it is not so techno-savvy as constructivism, provides better tools for dealing with personal and social realities. Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed shares many of constructivism's main ideas. Because the Third World lacks of Media Labs, Freire and his followers have developed several strategies for social construction of knowledge without depending on high technology, and, even more important, without the ideological baggage carried by computer simulations.

One of the most original applications of Freire's pedagogy is Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, which uses theater as a laboratory for social and political experimentation. Boal's techniques involve the creation of models of social and personal behavior. Participants of the Theater of the Oppressed are encouraged to question these models' ideological assumptions and present alternative strategies to deal with the problems they stage. Boal techniques perfectly fit the third alternative envisioned by Turkle, even if its simulations are created on the stage rather than on the computer.

Unlike constructivism, Boal's techniques do not mainly focus on the construction of models but rather on the modification of representations created by other participants. For example, participants of a technique known as Forum Theater can model a particular case of husband-wife relationship that involves an oppressive situation. The participants, who are called spect-actors, explore the model by both playing under the defined rules but also by proposing alternative ones.

In this talk I will suggest a technique for creating videogames that foster critical thinking through the participant's manipulation of the inner rules of simulations dealing with social and personal issues.

This talk is partially based on my Thesis "Videogames of the Oppressed: Videogames as a means of critical thinking and debate", presented at the Georgia Institute of Technology under the supervision of Dr. Janet Murray. The full text is available at www.jacaranda.org/frasca

About the author: Gonzalo Frasca holds a Master Degree in Information Design and Technology. His research interests focus on videogame design theory and cultural studies. He has worked for Hewlett Packard and CNN, where he was Editor of Science and Technology at CNNenEspañol.com. Currently, he spends his days -and some nights- playing on his computer at the Cartoon Network, where he works as a videogame designer.