Serious games have been described as chocolate-covered broccoli, meaning that even though they are intended to be both enjoyable and educational, the game medium doesn’t seem to mix these two ideas very well. Throughout the quarter, we’ve played both serious and non-serious games. Personally, the only one I enjoyed was the Uber Game because the feeling of not being able to do enough yet doing too much was well portrayed through the limited decisions and challenging circumstances the player is forced to make. I feel like this is something that the game We are Chicago is lacking.
The point of the game is for the player to better understand what it is like to live with your life constantly being threatened by violence in a poverty-stricken Chicago neighborhood. The game does this by building a connection between Aaron and his family and friends, yet in a way that mimics a book rather than a game because, at the end of the day, the player’s choices don’t matter. We are Chicago lacks the challenge and choice of a game. Each option the player has to choose from is rather similar, and despite the characters remembering your choices, they lack any real effect. I didn’t actually play the game because I have a Mac, but Aaron still moved over when I watched a walkthrough on YouTube, and the person playing didn’t choose to cross to the other side of the road. The right choices were still always made, and there was only one ending making the game more of an interactive story. Unlike We are Chicago, I found the Uber Game’s choices more difficult because it heavily emphasizes the point of being exhausted, and you can visually see the money the Uber driver has. We are Chicago is too optimistic, making it miss the point of trying to escape violence. Even in the end, Aaron could not understand why his friends joined gangs. Aaron simply said I’m not put under the same pressure as they were and the player is left feeling similarly.
It is debatable whether or not serious games can work. I think they can, and what We are Chicago lacks is, again a challenge that the creators could do by making the choices matter or making everything a little less perfect.
It’s definitely a good question. In my opinion, the solution for striking the balance between broccoli and chocolate may lie in the cliché of “show, don’t tell.” Having an interactive story as the premise might not necessarily weaken the message, but as you say, the implementation of a choice mechanic without actually following through with it in addition to channeling the player toward an inevitably optimistic ending for Aaron might not have been the most effective vehicle for long-lasting insight. The dialog choices seemed to be a vehicle in themselves to convey twice the amount of information; in a sense, we do get to see different sides of Aaron in what he could say. But without any consequences, the information lacks weight. Since the game is based off of real anecdotes and interviews and made “using real stories”, perhaps leaning into the visual novel vehicle might’ve worked better, to allow development to be focused around one linear story without having to write and record additional dialogue that has little impact on or payoff for the plot.