Comments on: Didactic games: Don’t share your personal information when you go to college! https://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/2003/08/29/didactic-games-dont-share-your-personal-information-when-you-go-to-college/ My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a Ludologist [researcher of the design, meaning, culture, and politics of games]. This is my blog on game research and other important things. Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:44:50 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: JP https://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/2003/08/29/didactic-games-dont-share-your-personal-information-when-you-go-to-college/comment-page-1/#comment-74 Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:44:50 +0000 http://www.jesperjuul.dk/ludologist/?p=33#comment-74 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.

]]> By: JP https://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/2003/08/29/didactic-games-dont-share-your-personal-information-when-you-go-to-college/comment-page-1/#comment-73 Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:32:58 +0000 http://www.jesperjuul.dk/ludologist/?p=33#comment-73 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).

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