Public Media, Public Diplomacy, Games, and Place

OK, time for some beardy musings. Ren just posted about the BBC 1 Big Weekend and referenced a discussion on Raph’s site about public media. In it, Raph throws cold water on Alice’s discussions of how games could fit into public media. Given the intersecting pieces of public media , public diplomacy , and public broadcast that have happened in Second Life alone over the last two weeks, it is clear that Raph isn’t giving either the BBC or other public media sources enough credit. More importantly, it highlights an interesting choice when thinking about how to use technology in the public media/public diplomacy arena. Public media is looking at what games and virtual worlds can bring to the table. Harvard’s Berkman Center hosted Beyond Broadcast this weekend and conducted a simulcast into Second Life. A year ago it might have been correct to think that broadcast media isn’t influenced by virtual worlds, but that is no longer the case. Which leads to another of Raph’s comments. He says that the World Bank can’t afford the price tag of making games. First, while they might not be the kind of games that Raph makes, both the PBS and BBC sites are FULL of games. My three year old has been a pretty avid web game player since she was two and she spends nearly all of her online time on these two sites. Second, the BBC has proven quite adept at demonstrating how to experiment within a limited budget, with 1 Big Weekend a prime example. Plus, the technological differences between what was required to create 1 Big Weekend and — say — to host public debate on intervention in Iran, including live discussions with participants from appropriate countries, links to up-to-date news and analysis, technical discussions of enrichment and the history of confrontations between nuclear-armed nations is negligible. Any organization that wanted to do this could pull it off for relatively low cost — zero cost compared to developing a game from scratch. The BBC is simply ahead of everyone else. This brings us to the real questions. Sure, people can spend time making decent single player games that teach about food distribution. On the other hand, you could build a space in Second Life that showed how to distribute the food or introduced you to the people getting the food. These places allow you to engage in discourse about the problems and challenges, rather than playing through a fixed experience that encodes one set of beliefs. When we look to the future of virtual worlds, we should focus on playing to their unique attributes — putting people into shared places. My only disappointment in the otherwise excellent USC Center for Public Diplomacy Awards Ceremony was that it was an award for the best “Game” used to advance public diplomacy. How much further can we go when we truly become comfortable thinking beyond games?