Metaphors and Perception

This post is a little different than usual. It's actually a repost from one of my other projects - The Bone Wars Project. You've probably seen me tweeting about it off and on. It's a educational video game I'm working on for a class. We're partnered with the Indianapolis Children's Museum, and the game is about Marsh and Cope and their bitter feud to be the best paleontologists that they can be. This post is a reflection on the first sprint of our project. We have a paper prototype of the game, and a core set system in digital format - you can follow or check out the project at bonewarsproject.blogspot.com if you're inclined. Once the digital version more user-friendly, we'll be releasing different iterations of that as we go. As far as the paper version of the game - I'll actually have it with me at Who Yer Con and Indiana Comic Con if anyone is interested.

Anyway, this is more of a rhetorical reflection about the way we think about things and how metaphors shape perception. Hopefully you find some value in it. 

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Lately I’ve been caught up on what it means to be creating a “serious” game.

I know what it means. I’m sure most of the class knows what it means. Does anyone outside of our world know what it means though? If we walk up to someone in the architecture department and ask them what a serious game was, could they answer? Would the random passerby in the halls of Letterman know what it is? The term is ambiguous and perhaps disingenuous.

Wouldn’t any game development team that cares about their product consider their game serious? If you tell someone “I’m working on a serious game.” Would they cock their head and look at you funny until you explained it was actually an educational game.

What would happen if you told someone “I’m working on a serious game” and they asked “what’s it about?” We’d respond with “dinosaur fossils” and I suspect they’d ask “what’s serious about it?” We’re not dealing with violence, sexual assault, genocide, or another topic that could be considered serious to many people – we’re creating an educational historic game.

I think the idea of serious games only works within academia or with people who study and understand the term. Over the past few weeks while exploring the social media outlets for our project, I’ve come to learn that “serious games” is not something that is inherently understandable. A search for serious games on twitter will bring you to people talking about Call of Duty or their latest raid in World of Warcraft. By our understanding of a serious game, these are not serious games.

From an internal stand point, none of this is a problem – we know what we’re talking about. For our external communications, it’s a hurdle I need to jump over. Regardless of the external challenges, the idea of the language we use internally I’ve found quite fascinating. How does the language we commonly understand affect our performed identity and our team identity?

Does the idea that we’re working on a serious game cause of us work more efficiently? Are we striving to make something as perfect as we possibly can because it is a serious game? Would we be more concerned with other areas of production if we used “educational game” more often? I, for one, may have put less thought into certain aspects of the project because this is a “serious” game.

For instance, the historical accuracy of the game may mean less to me than the learning functions of our actions. I realized in our last meeting that the dinosaur fossils being in the historically accurate dig site was not a major concern of mine. I’ve been more concerned about the processes in which player’s achieve the fossils and the history of Marsh and Cope.

To be clear, there is more going on here than just “because we call it a serious game, I think this way about it.” My personal preferences and things that I find interesting come into play here as well. I’m merely pontificating on how our work ethic could be different if we used a different lexicon.

What if we were working on a big budget “Triple A” title for EA? Would the side of me that enjoys Gears of War or Borderlands come out, causing me to be more interested in high quality graphics and explosions? Maybe.

I firmly believe that the language we use shapes the way we think about everything. From our game development team to our personal lives, the way we conduct ourselves, the language we surround ourselves with, will all play a role in shaping who we are as people. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By explains that we understand ideas based on the type of language that we use. I’m curious as to how we could change the meaning of our game, based on how we refer to the different things we’re doing to create it.

What if our programmers didn’t wrestle with code? What if they danced with code instead? Does that put them in a different stand of mind? Would they approach their work different? Perhaps with more finesse and grace?

What if our artists weren’t starving? Perhaps they are nourished or satiated artists. They aren’t struggling with creativity, but embracing their talents and what they know rather than fighting with it.

Our collective identity is formed by the language and symbols we use with each other. We come to an understanding and agreement on how we will interact with each other and our projects, and as time passes, our group identity forms out of the shared language and symbols we’ve grown accustom to.