From various sources, a game called Carabella Goes To College: You play the role of Carabella who begins at college – you then have to make decisions about what personal information you want to share with various companies and institutions.
It’s a game for the slightly paranoid and most of the decisions are pretty clear: The game is hosted on a site called privacyactivism.org. Do they think that you should be giving your email address away?
It makes me think of Gonzalo Frasca‘s call for political games: I always fear this kind of thing – some set-in-stone ideology that the game wants to hammer into your head. I just don’t believe that the plainly didactic is ever that interesting – art needs to have some sort of doubt or open-endedness to be worthwhile.
The best games pose questions and present you with the tools to answer those questions. Critics love to fawn over games like Metal Gear Solid 2 and Ico but in the terms you suggest, they’re completely didactic in that they only allow you to form and express one interpretation of the subject matter. MGS2 *expects* you to care about Emma and feel sad when she dies, and Ico *expects* you to feel sympathy for the ghost girl and want to escort her around – it’s simply not possible within the scope of either game to express your indifference to or loathing for them.
All games, of course, are rule-bounded structures (no game allows the player to express an arbitrarily wide range of ideas) but most designers these days care only about telling the player their story, and don’t even consider the possibility of dispute or dissent – the communication only runs one way. The true potential of games is that they can facilitate a Socratic dialogue between designer and player(s).
Put another way, you could either make a game that expresses, in didactic terms, a moral such as “Freedom Is More Important Than Security”. OR, you could create a game that puts players in numerous situations where they must choose between greater freedom and greater security, and then convey the consequences of these choices to the player, which may or may not influence later choices.
Interestingly, the choices offered in such a game wouldn’t really be meaningful (which in most cases translates to “not fun”) if the game’s design was heavily influenced by some designer agenda. If there is only ever one truly viable answer to a question, then the interactivity is trivialized – it’s a puzzle, rather than a problem.