From Ian Bogost’s talk at the 2013 Games for Change conference:
When people talk about “changing the world with games,” in addition to checking for your wallet, perhaps you should also check to see if there are any games involved in those world changing games[.] The dirty truth about most of these serious games, the one that nobody wants to talk about in public, is they’re not really that concerned about being games. This is mostly because games are hip, they make appealing peaks in your grant application, they offer new terrain, undiscovered country, they give us new reasons to pursue existing programs in order to keep them running.
Maybe what we want are not “serious’ games, but earnest games. Games that aren’t just instrumental or opportunistic in their intentions.
Nails it.