Gameplay Journal #8 — Games for Change
Resilience is an indie title created with the goal of conveying the day to day struggles that refugee camps face to an audience that most likely never has or never will experience, and does so by putting the player in the role of a manager of an alien refugee camp. The game moves pretty fast, constantly throwing more and more refugees your way, as well as random events that can help or hinder, all while pushing the player to try and handle it all as best they can with limited resources and funding. All of this comes together to make a pretty difficult game to wrap your head around. A lot is happening all at once, and to succeed in the end a player has to balance a lot of numbers and factors that go into keeping your refugees alive. Lose too many in a short amount of time and you lose, and have to start all over again. After spending a while playing I was never personally able to make it past about half way through the full 120 cycle version of the game.
But this difficulty is inherently intentional, and required to communicate the message that the game carries. The game takes advantage of its medium to convey a set of values using the VAP method defined in the reading when the authors state “Sometimes, values are expressed explicitly in the functional definition of a system” (Flanagan & Nissenbaum, 183). The systems inside the game, like the random events, constant flow of refugees, limited resources, etc, are all used to express struggle. And through that struggle, and how the game forces the player to experience it, the game communicates the overarching values held by the developers. More explicitly how the developers want to help camps like these in real life, and hope that through creating a way to shown how hard these camps can have it that more eyes can be put on this issue and hopefully come together to try and help solve it.
Flanagan, M., & Nissenbaum, H. (2007). A game design methodology to incorporate social activist themes. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI ’07. doi:10.1145/1240624.1240654