Serious games

The fastest-growing component of the media sector worldwide, the video game market, is a $37.5-billion-ayear industry — and that’s excluding hardware and related merchandise. Video game spending has already surpassed domestic revenue from movie ticket sales, and this year it’s well on the road to overtaking music spending by nearly 20 percent. The industry could reach $50 billion by 2011, according to a recent report from Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Today, “serious games” — online and console video games tackling social and environmental issues — aim to influence the way people think about gaming, and the way they think about current issues. A handful of pioneering firms say they see the business potential for games with a purpose.

Take Operation: Climate Control, for example. A slick, online video game aimed at educating school children about environmental issues, underwritten by the U.K. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Operation: Climate Control was created by Oxford-based Red Redemption, a company that develops environmentally conscious games and interactive media.

Red Redemption and other companies like it are serious about bringing environmentally conscious games to the forefront of the video game industry. Gobion Rowlands, managing director, producer and co-founder of Red Redemption, says the company’s primary focus is on producing games that directly address sustainability and climate change.

“Part of our initial focus was to develop a strong track record in the field and a market lead that would allow us to develop bigger games addressing climate change and sustainability,” says Rowlands. “When we started making our environmental games there were many unknowns about the market and whether it was possible to make fun games on the issues involved.”

Red Redemption creates educational video games aimed at environmental issues.

Before creating Operation: Climate Control, Red Redemption partnered with the BBC to launch an interactive climate change game called Climate Challenge. Inviting people to guide a virtual Europe through the next century while reducing carbon emissions and halting global warming, Climate Challenge, accessed through the BBC Web site, was played by 82,000 people during the first week of its release, according to Red Redemption.

Now, Red Redemption is actively seeking new partners around the world. “As the first major game, Climate Challenge directly proved games about climate change can be both fun and educational,” Rowlands says. “But to build on this, we always follow up every major release with scientific and market research so that we can further improve on our games and also provide additional supporting data to our partners.”

Though Red Redemption’s initial growth was financed exclusively through revenues and seed finance, Rowlands says that is changing. “We have had potential investment interest, and, now that we have achieved the strong position, we are exploring looking for potential investment to grow the company.”

“The whole market is growing consistently and reaching all segments of society.”

Rowlands says the new wave of socially and ecologically conscious gaming is a big financial opportunity for companies involved with the burgeoning industry. “As a company, we are very confident about the overall growth of both the fields of serious gaming and also games with a training aspect,” he says. “The whole market is growing consistently and reaching all segments of society.”

Games for Change, a nonprofit organization that provides support and publicity to games developed for social change, recently partnered with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) to explore new ways of bringing together the worlds of social issues and gaming. The result was the Xbox 360 Games for Change Challenge, a worldwide competition launched in the summer of 2007 to participants in more than 100 countries. The Challenge engages college students to develop games based on global warming using Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express software.

Suzanne Seggerman, president and co-founder of Games for Change (G4C), says the decision to partner with Microsoft was mutual. “We at G4C knew that the new XNA platform was an incredible opportunity for innovation — by letting players create their own games,” she says. “And Microsoft had heard that we had received a MacArthur Foundation grant for our work with new uses of video games. This is just one part of a long-term initiative between G4C and Microsoft.”

The winner of the Challenge will have a rare opportunity — a chance to see his or her game go up on Xbox Live with other commercially produced entertainment titles. The Xbox Live site, which allows Xbox users to select games online, reaches an estimated 6 million players, according to Seggerman. “We hope that this contest will plant the seeds for many new games and game concepts that may someday turn into fully realized commercial games,” she says.

While Seggerman expresses cautious optimism, Rowlands says his experience attests to the popularity of serious games, and he considers the category’s unique contribution to be an important part of the growth of the commercial game market.

“Games such as SimCity feature a wide range of learning elements, and our games perform well in such environments,” he says. All the games Red Redemption produces are commercial, but Rowlands says the precise funding mechanism and expected return on investment vary, depending on whether the game is produced through a business-to-business partnership or as a direct-to-consumer product. However, one thing remains constant in determining a product’s success, he says: “the strength of the gameplay.”

Player engagement is a key issue of games’ success, and particularly games with a social mission. Perhaps because of that relationship, environmental action and awareness has inspired not just the creators of video games, but also the denizens of a virtual world.

Second Life is an online virtual world where more than 8 million “residents” socialize, create and purchase goods and services, own land and otherwise “live” standard lives. And that includes real-world spending. Linden Dollars (L$), the currency used in Second Life, trade at about L$268 for every U.S. dollar. The total value of the Linden Dollars circulating in Second Life is estimated at $9.7 million. Some enterprising companies and nonprofits are working to capture some of that real-world value for real-world environmental causes.

In April 2007, nearly 1,000 residents of Second Life celebrated Earth Day by attending lectures given by environmental experts, watching live music and taking tours of Etopia Island, a Second Life eco-village that features virtual green buildings, community space and educational eco-workshops.

One organization that took part in planning the Earth Day celebration was the Avatar Action Center, a Second Life organization whose published mission is to “educate people in virtual life about real world sustainability issues and encourage them to take action in real life.”

Made up entirely of volunteers, the Avatar Action Center is making a concerted effort to shed light on environmental and social issues through online worlds. It recently started the Avatar Action Fund, a nonprofit organization that raises money for funding real-world causes dedicated to social justice. Members of Second Life are able to donate money at information kiosks located throughout the virtual world.

Further connecting people in virtual worlds to activism in the real world is the Second Chance Trees Reforestation Project. The project is centered on a virtual island in Second Life that was designed to resemble a rain forest. While on the island, visitors are able to learn about endangered rain forests and the dangers of deforestation, and are then given the opportunity to purchase a virtual tree and plant it in a designated Second Life area. For every virtual tree purchased, a real tree will be planted in an actual endangered rainforest environment.

Converseon, the media company that conceived, designed and developed the Second Chance Trees Reforestation Project, says it believes Second Life can be a powerful tool for teaching individuals about environmentalism.

“While many people won’t ever have the experience of flying to Brazil to plant a tamarind tree (while learning about the impact of deforestation and the ecologically fragile environment), they can have the closest approximation in SL,” Rob Key, Converseon’s CEO, said in a press release.

But while many may applaud the creative environmental efforts of the people and companies who develop and support video games and online worlds, their actions are not without controversy.

When computer company Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) announced its Earth Day plan to offer free virtual trees to residents of Second Life, it was swiftly taken to task by people who regarded the plan as nothing more than a misguided promotion. The plan was an extension of Dell’s Plant a Tree for Me program, which allows Dell customers to purchase a tree that will be planted by Dell to help offset a computer user’s carbon footprint. Detractors of the plan noted a Second Life tree is essentially a software application that requires computing power to grow and show up in the virtual world, thereby increasing Second Life’s carbon emissions. (Another project, Releaf, launched by German firm Force Sunrise, aims to help inhabitants of virtual worlds achieve carbon-neutrality for their avatars by supporting real world reforestation projects.)

Until the best approach for virtual worlds is worked out, firms such as Red Redemption are working to operate in the real world as (in Rowland’s words) “100 percent sustainable.”

Red Redemption enlists a number of strategies to reach the goal, Rowlands says, from purchasing 100 percent renewable energy for its offices to printing its materials with vegetable-based inks on recycled and sustainably sourced paper. The company selected its computers for energy efficiency, and employees turn them off overnight (except, of course, key servers). Employees travel primarily by public transport and rarely fly, preferring instead to carry out many meetings via Skype and other video conferencing tools.

Rowlands also notes that Red Redemption expects the same from its partners. “With a business such as ours,” Rowlands says, “it is important that any potential investor be committed to sustainable business and fit the ethical profile of the company.”