Zombie economics

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Games are all the rage in social change, and with good reason; games can teach us a lot about ourselves, and they’re excellent spaces for experimentation. One of the difficulties of using games as tools, though, is that good games are based on elegant structures, and it's easy to knock them out of balance by adding goals that don’t fit the game’s internal logic. Giving a game a purpose usually means sucking the fun out of it.

Take educational games, for instance. Whether they deploy video effects or a simple deck of cards, games that are meant to teach often wind up feeling like a lecture shoehorned into flashy packaging. This is, paradoxically, because educational games take themselves both too seriously, and not seriously enough. 

Too many time outs

The too serious side of the equation is often easier to see: games that tell you what they’re trying to teach you are about as fun as a mystery that begins with an outline of how the entire story will unfold. Good games are built on an elegant set of rules, and those rules have a curious affect: they create a boundary that lets people know when they are playing the game and when they are not. Game theorists call this boundary the “magic circle.” Games that broadcast the lessons they’re trying to teach are trying to have it both ways – they ask players to jump back and forth between being fully immersed in the game and having enough distance from it to understand what they’re trying to learn.

No lessons in the logic

And on the not serious enough side, games designed to educate or create social change often short-change how deeply the lessons their trying to convey have to be embedded in the game’s structure. Games like chess and Grand Theft Auto don’t just teach us how to move players around a board or a city to collect points or defeat an opponent, they give us space to explore strategy and tactics. And they do this with a mix of rigid constraints and wide-open possibilities. Games with a small number of possible outcomes don’t allow players to truly find their own way, and more to the point, they’re not fun.

But great games that teach or create change are all around us, they’re just not always clearly labeled. My tendency to get caught up in games for hours on end has kept me from exploring the full breadth of games available for my iPhone, but among of the few games I allow myself to play is one that teaches lessons in economics, particularly personal investment and cash flow. The fact that it is sold under the name Plants vs. Zombies (PvZ) can give people who see me playing it on the subway the mistaken impression that I am goofing off rather than learning how to better manage my bank account.

Plants vs. Zombies is what’s known as a tower defense game – your job is to set up an effective defense against an invading army of zombies. At your disposal is a menagerie of plants you won’t find any any garden: sunflowers that create sunlight (to power other plants), snow pea plants that shoot frozen peas, and cabbage-pults that launch heads of cabbage at the approaching hordes. Each round you get to choose seeds from an expanding list of plants for your garden, and here’s where the economics lessons start getting baked into the game.

As with any smart money management strategy, the first thing you learn in PvZ is that a balanced approach is best. Investing in a bunch of powerful offensive plants seems like a good idea at first, but if you don’t have any defenses to hold off the zombies while you do your planting, you’re likely to be overrun very quickly. And once you have your seed mix picked out, you need to make quick decisions about how many of each type of plant to drop into the limited number of spaces in your garden as the zombies do their best to eat their way to your home.

And then there’s the big economics lesson: you don’t know what’s coming until the pole vaulting zombies start jumping over your wall-nuts, so you’d better plan ahead for a lot of unknowns in your future. Learning to play PvZ is quick; learning to keep your head, have patience, and develop balanced strategies against both balloon zombies and zombies on zambonis takes time and practice. And as you play, you learn strategies for dealing with uncertainty by balancing offensive tactics, defensive tactics, and a few cherry bombs. 

Zombies are hard to beat

Now, a confession: I had planned on introducing a game at this point that is sort of the anti-PvZ: a game explicitly about personal economics that fails everywhere that PvZ succeeds. The Doorways to Dreams Fund (D2D) has been developing games that teach financial lessons for a few years, and one of their early attempts, Celebrity Calamity, is basically a personal budget simulation, with long explanations and almost no interesting game play at all. I had played Celebrity Calamity after meeting with D2D last year, and came away less than impressed. But, when I went to D2D’s website, I found that they’ve been hard at work on Farmblitz, which leaves Celebrity Calamity in the dust in terms of game play.

The rules of Farmblitz are very simple — it's a sort of tic-tac-toe for one player — and simple is often good in game design. But while fun to play, many of the lessons it's trying to teach are relegated off to the side of the action. Between each round you can invest in trees (your investments, that grow) or pay off your debts (represented by rabbits, that multiply).

Once your rabbits start to multiply out of control they start invading your vegetable patch, which is an interesting twist, but the lessons of Farmblitz are all right out on the surface, not embedded in the game play, so it winds up being a fun game with breaks for tips on avoiding debt. Still, this is a big step forward for D2D’s games, and hopefully the next generation will integrate the lessons and the game more tightly. In the mean time, I’m sharpening my physics knowledge with Angry Birds.

(If you’re interested in finding out more about using games for social good, check out Games for Change, PETLab. Tiltfactor, and Values at Play.)