I recently picked up Benjamin Stokes’s new book, Locally Played: Real-World Games for Stronger Places and Communities. The book discusses how local communities can leverage their own games as well as commercially-available games to foster civic engagement among their residents. Dr. Stokes is a civic media scholar and the director of the Playful City Lab at American University. He is also the co-founder of Games for Change, an organization dedicated to advancing social change with games and celebrating accomplishments in the educational and persuasive games field. Games for Change just held their annual conference a few weeks ago in a free online format, and it was a great experience in spite of the limitations.
As the national political climate in America continues to look rather bleak, I have turned more and more of my attention to how a reinvigorated local civic life can renew American civil society. In the summer of 2018, I read Daniel Hopkins’s The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized, which laid much of the blame for the current national political gridlock at the feet of a weakening local political culture in America. This is unfortunate because political polarization is lower at the local level, and trust in local news sources and government institutions remain relatively high. However, we’ve also seen the dramatic shrinking of availability of local news as newspapers close, newsrooms shrink, and news content becomes increasingly pre-packaged for national distribution. The collapse of local newspapers has been the topic of discussion for political comedians like John Oliver and Samantha Bee. Bee’s piece actually looked at the use of “gamification” to increase local newspaper readership, and her show’s rather half-hearted experiment with gamification would probably leave viewers with a rather skeptical attitude of games’ application in the civic sphere.
So this moment of crisis on the one hand and opportunity on the other for local civic involvement makes this book particularly timely. Stokes describes a number of applications for civic games such as spurring small business with games that award community currency that can be exchanged for real money by small businesses, encouraging strangers to meet and get to know each other, teaching local history, and crowd-sourcing community assets and community problems. Sometimes these solutions used smart devices, GPS tracking, and augmented reality digital overlays, but some designs were deliberately low-tech. Since I wrote my master’s thesis on developing a gamified local civics platform for high school students, I came to this book with a pretty deep understanding of the literature on this subject already including some of Stokes’s other work that I’ll mention again later. This book is mostly a primer on civic games, but there were a number of useful case studies included that provided insights for those who are already familiar with the field. I certainly took plenty of notes for myself.
The book has two major points that I think are the most important for anyone looking to build games and gamified systems for civic engagement. The first is to know your audience and its context. In one example, Stokes describes a game run at an art school that encouraged students to create video projects. In that context, it was immensely successful, but when the game was repeated with students at a school mostly for students studying communications and journalism, it failed. The main reason was that the journalism and communications students had no need of a video project for their personal portfolios. The game’s activity was time-consuming, and the long-term benefit was more obvious for the film students than the journalism students. In a number of other examples though, cities effectively leveraged their brand and a local history to craft an experience that would be especially relevant for their own residents.
The second major takeaway is that games should work to use existing institutions and communities to generate interest. When designers create products either for commercial or community purposes, we tend to think of the users just as individuals in relationship with the product. This is never simply the case, and games and services intended to get people civically engaged especially need to break out of this mindset. Schools, libraries, parks departments, emergency services, museums, historical societies, universities, community colleges, theaters, community centers, religious organizations, clubs, sports teams, local news outlets, and local businesses can all be organizational partners for civic games. They can serve to not only promote the game but also to organize players into teams, track player progress, or act as sites for play. Cities also each have their own civic rhythm in the form of holidays, festivals, and institutional calendars that can be used to promote or frame game activities.
In the last few chapters of the book, Stokes discusses how cities are connecting with existing commercial augmented reality games to build civic participation. I first learned about the initiatives described in the book from a report entitled Cities Remix a Playful Platform created by Stokes, Samantha Dols, and Aubrey Hill at American University that was presented at the 2018 Games for Change conference. The report and the presentation at the conference highlighted the efforts by three cities: San Jose, Philadelphia, and Boston to use Pokemon GO to create greater civic involvement. San Jose made the game part of their open streets festival that cleared a number of city roads of traffic to allow for pedestrians. Philadelphia’s free libraries created something of a scavenger hunt that connected to digital locations in the game. Boston worked with Niantic, the company that runs Pokemon GO, to add a number of new game locations based on the local history collected and curated by Boston-area students. Despite the dismissive attitude of national political leaders (including Hillary Clinton’s cringe-inducing appeal for young people in 2016 to “Pokemon GO to the polls” that November), city leaders have taken the game seriously as a means to build civic engagement.
The Pokemon GO examples provided in the book are becoming increasingly relevant as new augmented reality games appear on the market. Since Pokemon GO, new entries like Jurassic World Alive and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite have been released. Minecraft Earth, an augmented reality spin on the phenomenally popular Minecraft, and Catan: World Explorers, an augmented reality version of the board game that helped launch the tabletop game renaissance we’re currently living in, are both currently in development. None have quite captured the lightning in a bottle that was Pokemon GO’s first month after launch, but perhaps Stokes’s lesson for city leaders is just as relevant for companies looking to develop the next big augmented reality game.
Pokemon GO had the distinct advantage of holding the license to the highest-grossing intellectual property in human history (seriously, even more than any one Disney property). It could rely on players’ relationship to the IP to drive its popularity, and what happened after the game’s mega-success in the summer of 2016 demonstrates why it’s not viable for other game companies to try to repeat that initial success. Even Niantic’s follow-up game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, in spite of being based off the immensely popular Wizarding World franchise, was a comparative ghost town upon its release. Players who got bored with Pokemon GO didn’t move on to Ingress, Jurassic World Alive or another AR game. They moved back to mobile games that didn’t require them to interact with the physical world or the people around them. That might seem like a sad indictment of our antisocial, couch potato society, but it’s really more that these kinds of games have to leverage our existing communities to be successful. If future augmented reality game developers want to be successful, they need to form the kind of partnerships Niantic made after the initial Pokemon GO craze had died down. If a company developing an augmented reality game lacks the resources to engage in that kind of direct partnership-building on a large scale, they can at least develop online training resources for institutions to integrate the game into their programming.
Whether communities build their own civic games or make use of existing commercial games, it is vitally important that they understand their audiences and the contexts in which those audiences play. The field is wide open for games that could be used to revive local news by encouraging readership, get people voting, increase shopping locally, boost volunteerism, crowd-source the policy positions of local candidates running for offices too small to attract much media attention, or cultivate any number of prosocial behaviors. As the Locally Played makes clear, this won’t happen through a single solution. Many communities will have to create rich experiences for a variety of situations, and this gives municipal planners across the country the chance to make improvements wherever they are by creating fun experiences that are unique to their communities.