This excerpt appears in the upcoming Newsgames book.
As game scholar Espen Aarseth has observed, all games require "non-trivial effort" to play, as player interaction is required for a game to operate at all. But community games require a different kind of labor, one that involves even greater personal effort and investment, one that goes beyond manipulating tokens on a board or characters on-screen. In addition, these games ask players to put themselves on the line, in public, often in front of strangers. This is a type of community involvement that community activism rarely accomplishes, let alone local news.
So far, just one example of this kind of community game exists. Picture the Impossible, developed jointly by the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, is a game situated in a specific geographic location. The website describes the game's mission:
The game engages members of the community in exploration of the City of Rochester, and encourages both creativity and charitable giving in the community. Players participate in a range of activities, including casual web-based games, games that bring players out to events and locations throughout the city, and games that involve the tangible aspects of the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper itself.
The name "Picture the Impossible" is a name meant to play on the city's history in the field of optics: Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, and Pictometry were all founded in Rochester. The game began September 12, 2009 and ended a month and a half later, on Halloween. Players were organized into factions (The Tree, Forge, and Watch), and competed for points to earn prizes. The faction dynamic creates competitive drama in the game, though it seems like a holdover trope from ARGs rather than an integral design choice.
The game separates activities into online and offline tasks. Online, the game offered tile-sliding puzzles of local photographs, map quizzes to test Rochester trivia, as well as jigsaw puzzles and video quizzes. Offline, players would extract passwords for online sites from the paper's crossword puzzle, to go geocaching and scavenger hunts in the community, create videos and take photographs, and do charity work. These activities portray the cultural heritage of Rochester while forming a sense of local community. Secondarily, the game's creators hoped they might help boost tourism, newspaper sales, and the local economy.
Though the game's online discussion board does not boast huge numbers, it shows a tight knit group who became invested in the project. One player by the name of Tazwalker posted a lengthy entry on the PTI forums discussing how the game had improved his community involvement. "I find myself to be a better person from it," he wrote, "and I feel accomplished for helping and getting to know others while I've used the city as my playground." While isolated, these responses suggest a viable example for future community games.
Given the state of the news industry, especially the local paper industry, the Democrat and Chronicle and RIT accomplished something important in Picture the Impossible. They developed a model for a platform that involves a variety of organizations, drawing together the local community and advancing the role of the local paper.
The game also coalesced the local community through its very underwriting. Picture the Impossible would have remained impossible without the collaboration of community sponsors and partners. Microsoft Bing provided much of the technical implementation, local charities underwrote some of the project, local media company WXXI provided the multi-media support, Rochester-founded Kodak donated prizes, and Boston-based SCVNGR created the platform for the local scavenger hunts and geocaching.
The Rochester Institute of Technology's Student Innovation Center and the Department of Interactive Games and Media developed the game's structure, mechanics, and implementation, while the Democrat and Chronicle supplied material and puzzles created by its reporters, artists, photographers, and editors. The Democrat and Chronicle, facing the hardships of the print media industry, chose to try something fresh and inventive. "Picture the Impossible" could just as easily describe the undertaking itself: in a time of economic hardship, get local companies to team up with a newspaper and university to develop a game.
Picture the Impossible suggests a final reason to prefer the name community games over alternate reality games or even big games: people can understand the idea of engaging in play in their own communities as a means to better both themselves and their community, far more easily than they are likely to grasp the idea of becoming citizens of some hypothetical fantasy or science fiction world told through distributed media.
Community games are, at their hearts, immensely nostalgic: they invite a kind of wholesome return to a time when communities were local, when people knew their neighbors and their shopkeepers, when someone's problem was everyone's. Is this too retrograde a promise to deliver on realistically? Perhaps. But at a time when the local newspaper is almost as much a memory as the milkman, maybe there's no harm in trying.
