When asked by people outside of tech about the products I’ve helped to design, I sometimes hesitate to mention my work on PlayStation 4, because I don’t always know what their response will be. Usually, it’s enthusiastic: “Wow, that’s cool!” But it’s not unusual to get a more cautious response, especially from people who came of age before video games: “That’s interesting … but … do you worry about what video games are doing to kids?”
While it would be easy to simply dismiss the skeptics (OK, Boomer), these contrasting reactions to gaming reflect a schism in culture that shouldn’t be dismissed: While video gaming is a massive economic force, the global revenue of which now eclipses the film industry’s, it’s also seen by many as a pariah. Consider a game like Fortnite, where players fight to the death, Hunger Games-style, to be the last one standing: If you aren’t a gamer (and, to be clear, I’m only a casual gamer myself, and a fan of oddball indie titles at that), what morals do you imagine Fortnite’s massive audience are being taught? Just as the PMRC leveled invectives against certain rock and hip-hop music acts in the 1980s, it’s easy for people today who don’t play or understand video games to pass blanket judgment.
The question of whether video games are vile and pernicious or merely innocuous amusements is the subject of ongoing research, which shows little sign of reaching consensus. For every advisory that exposure to violent games desensitizes players and makes them more aggressive, competing scientific studies find no ill effects. Much of this controversy ends up as unfortunate polemics. “Look at the culture of death that is being celebrated [in video games],” says Matt Bevin, governor of Kentucky, claiming that video games are somehow to blame for school shootings. In contrast, you have voices like Steven Pinker, a noted psychology professor at Harvard, who observes, “If consuming violent media made you violent, then we should prevent adults from reading the Iliad, or for that matter the Old Testament.”
But given that video games themselves aren’t going anywhere, this polarized debate distracts us from a more important question:
How might gaming’s limitless creative potential be used for good?
This is the question my colleagues and I at Wunderman Thompson set out to tackle in a recent project with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). We asked, what if the world’s most popular shooter game could be used to educate people about Red Cross’s work in the real world? Could Fortnite players save lives instead of taking them (figuratively speaking)?
To achieve this, we partnered with Team Evolve, an international collective of game builders who create innovative experiences in Fortnite’s creative mode to build Liferun, in which players compete as fantastical interpretations of Red Cross workers to be the first to finish four timed missions, each of which mirrors a specific component of the Red Cross’s real-life mission to “provide humanitarian protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and other situations of violence.” In Liferun, players deliver supplies, defuse mines, rebuild infrastructure and provide medical care, like real Red Cross workers do, and in so doing learn about the Red Cross’s mission.
