Wired magazine commissioned Cutthroat Capitalism for its July 2009 feature investigating the economic issues behind piracy off the coast of Somalia. (CBC) When the B.C. Dairy Foundation wanted to promote healthy eating among kids, it skipped the television commercial and made a video game instead.

Titanium Chef, developed by Vancouver's Mod7 Communications and released in 2009, aims to encourage students to eat healthy food by putting them in the role of a robot chef. They explore the galaxy for ingredients, learning which ingredients are used in wholesome meals.

Video games are proving to be powerful persuaders, and they are becoming an effective means of delivering messages, particularly complicated ones, to an audience.

'I'm amazed that there's any advertiser that doesn't invest a substantial portion of their advertising budget in games.'

— David Edery

Video games are "best at representing the many conflicting, moving parts of complex systems," Ian Bogost, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said in an interview. "Given that many of today's major issues deal with precisely this complexity, in which the simple answers fed to us by textbooks, television, and indeed the press, are insufficient."

Bogost is a co-author of Newsgames, to be released this fall by MIT Press. In the book, Bogost and his co-authors break down Cutthroat Capitalism, a game commissioned by Wired magazine to accompany its July 2009 feature investigating the economic issues behind piracy off the coast of Somalia.

"The game," they write, "forces players to understand piracy by experiencing it in abstraction."

In so doing, players — who take on the role of a pirate captain given the task of capturing a ship and negotiating a ransom — realize that the increasing number of attacks in recent years may be less a result of a country in chaos and more a result of smart strategy: a pirate earns best from many small ransoms, not one large payout. It's a business decision.

David Edery says that when it comes to advertising, the value proposition is "completely in favour of video games," as opposed to other media.

David Edery, founder of gaming consulting firm Fuzbi. (Courtesy David Edery) The founder of Fuzbi, a consulting firm that helps large companies design games, and the former worldwide games portfolio manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, Edery said that for the same budget an advertiser can produce and air a 30-second TV commercial that the average person will see maybe a dozen times, or develop a video game that will expose that person to the brand for dozens of hours if it's done well.

"I'm amazed," he confessed, "that there's any advertiser that doesn't invest a substantial portion of their advertising budget in games."

Engineering is key

But Bogost said that simply copying a popular video game — Pac-Man or Super Mario Bros., for example — and slapping a message on top of it likely won't be effective. "In order to incorporate a message or position effectively into the game," he explained, "you have to get it into the gameplay at a fundamental level."

Bogost's game design company, Persuasive Games, created a strategy game about building wind farms to create clean energy profitably. WindFall was designed to "show some of the tradeoffs associated with some of these [green energy] ideals," he said. Land, in the game, has a political cost associated with it, and where players choose to build turbines has an effect on the dynamics of the virtual community.

"The argument the game tries to make," said Bogost, "is that there is a dynamic, a set of interrelationships between local politics and community and clean energy."

Another Persuasive Game, Killer Flu, turns players into a flu virus in an attempt to demonstrate how pandemic viruses mutate and spread. "One of the things that games do," said Bogost, "is allow us to explore different roles than we're used to being in, and that gives us perspective."

Like becoming a flu virus, or a Somali pirate captain, or even a robotic chef from the year 3015.

According to Bogost, "Video games model the way things work. They allow players to take on roles constrained by rules in simulated worlds. In this context, players experience what it feels like to undergo a particular experience."