Disaster at Harperville

This past week Disaster at Harperville, a game that teaches reporting skills, was shown off at the Serious Games Summit (SGS). Part of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the SGS brings together developers, academics, and people from a variety of other industries to discuss alternative applications for games. Anything from using gameboys to teach diabetic children how to monitor their insulin to MMOs where players work together to save a planet from ecological disaster are par for the course.

Disaster at Harperville is a good example of adapting an existing game for one’s own purposes. The game’s creator, Nora Paul, has taken Neverwinter Nights (NWN), a game created to allow Dungeon Masters to build Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, and used it to build a journalist training campaign. NWN comes with a robust toolset that allows players to create their own content and share it with others online. Even more important, NWN has a fairly sophisticated system for creating dialogue. Lines of text can be structured into complex dialogue trees, which makes for an interesting series of dialogue choices on the player’s end. How one negotiates his way through a conversation becomes a game in itself.

In the game, the player must enter an evacuated downtown area to interview sources about an environmental disaster. According to an article on Gamasutra, Paul bounced her game off of an experienced game journalist and came up with a pretty cool approach to how character interaction would work. Here’s a clip:

After a discussion with Kotaku’s Brian Crecente, Paul chose to focus on three conceptual points in the interview process: attitude, reliability of source (as compares to authority), and secondary confirmation for every single detail. Subjects respond better to direct queries than to aloof or tentative approaches. They become annoyed when the player relies on them for basic information. Official mouthpieces and people with something to gain need be taken with a grain of salt, then revisited if an alternative take develops.

Disaster at Harperville has gotten an interesting amount of press, which I think is encouraging overall. I’m still amazed by press who are mystified or struck by practical applications for games, especially a game that has been around since 2002. I think Paul’s game is in a good spot for news for several reasons:

1. NWN is a very successful game with a large modding community.

2. Reporting skills are a perfect match for the medium and it’s a more down to earth domain than some serious games attempt to broach (ex. world peace).

3. It looks like she’s tested and refined her idea over time. The fact that she sought out game experts on content advice and not just technical tricks says a lot and puts her ahead of a lot of academics who are a little too white knuckled in the content area.

(Side note: The term “serious game” carries with it a certain amount of controversy. For one, developers who create standard video games can resent the suggestion the term carries that their games are only entertainment and don’t teach or make artistic statements. Also, there’s a significant history of games that have been mainstream, but have used games for more like the SGS encourages. Games like SimCity, Civilization, Brain Age are good examples. However, long discussions on game taxonomy have failed to produce a label that the majority wishes to replace “serious games” with as of yet.)