Gameful, positive impact gaming

I've been spending time recently in the company of some little people who are delightful in many ways. But I found myself reflecting this morning on how thoroughly their imaginations seem to have been colonised by martial-arts and televisual violence (think: Power Rangers, SHS, etc). The difficulty being that these forms of imaginary fighting are heavily based on individual strength and agility, make a rather arbitrary demarcation between goodies and baddies (ie they are like two football teams rather than being divided by values and commitments) and rather contextless (again rather like sports contests).

So I found myself worrying about the way that, in conversation about some of WWII, they seemed to think that a solution to Nazi presence would be to act violently towards German soldiers in a 'superhero' sort of way. Many of their scenarios began with 'What if ...'. At one point I felt I had to say to them that if one of a village did hit a soldier then that would actually result in everyone in the village being punished and many people being beaten up. I didn't press the point but, listening to them, I was becoming more and more disturbed by the way that fantasy violence was so disconnected from the world of systematic oppression and how the ideology of 'redemptive violence' was being laid down in imagination in ways quite divorced from reality. This is, in itself, quite an interesting reflection on arguments about just wars or otherwise: we need to recognise that too many people have an image of what it is about that is simply not robust enough to recognise the real brutalities and miseries.

So that's why I think it is good that some people are trying to produce imaginatively engaging games that don't continue to feed the memes of fantasy violence.
Check it out:
With a hat-tip to those lovely people at Worldchanging.
GAMEFUL, a Secret HQ for Worldchanging Game Developers by Jane McGonigal — Kickstarter: "Gameful is an online 'Secret HQ' where you can connect with other people who believe in the power of games to make us better and change the world.

It will be a free resource -"