Science in the Triangle

The world is becoming a more complicated place – but that’s OK with people like Phaedra Boinodiris.

As the gaming and marketing manager at IBM, Boinodiris said she sees the potential for video games to help everyone from citizens to political decision-makers understand issues by breaking them down into simpler elements. By showing the interactions between those pieces, Boinodiris said games can be effective at educating the public.

“It’s hard to capture any other way,” Boinodiris said. “We’re living in a more complex world.”

Boinodiris and her team at IBM wanted to break down that complexity about six months ago when they began working on a game to detail the company’s work with “smart cities.” The result was CityOne, a free city-building simulation developed with Center Line Digital in Raleigh, N.C., and released in early October.

Players begin the game as the manager of a drab, grayscale city facing serious infrastructure and industry problems. Using a limited set of resources and input from a group of advisers, players choose how they should invest in solutions like alternative energy and supply chain management. Winning the game, and creating a more vibrant city, depends on the player’s ability to effectively improve everything from water distribution to business climate.

“The initial inspiration for it was looking for ways to explain system solutions and its impact on the market and in the industry,” Boinodiris said.

Aside from the education component, Boinodiris said the game is out to communicate what IBM can do.

“There is no press release, no white paper, no spokesperson that can explain these concepts like a serious game can,” she said.

Daren Brabham, a professor of public relations at UNC-Chapel Hill, agrees. Through his research on crowdsourcing, he said he’s learned the power of interactive marketing and its ability to show the simple connections in a big system.

“With games, all they really do is teach us how to problem solve,” Brabham said. “The question is: What should the problem be?”

The interactivity doesn’t even have to be complicated to be effective.

In 2009, Brabham began a research project to crowdsource a design for a better bus stop in Salt Lake City. After initially planning a Web-based interface that would have allowed users to allocate resources in the planning of a 3-D model, Brabham abandoned the approach in favor of a more open submission system that just required applicants to send in sketches and plans. All of those designs were posted online, where users could rate and comment on them.

With that $5,000 site, Brabham said users submitted 260 designs. And two-thirds of them had never participated in a planning process before.

“To be honest, traditional methods of engaging stakeholders at a meeting really could only tackle one thing at a time,” he said. “[The crowdsourced method] would be a lot more of a democratic process than the 10 people who show up to the planning meeting and yell at each other.”

Boinodiris said she’s seen that need to participate among the public. She said people want to know what it would take for a city like Raleigh to support a smart grid, electric vehicles or other sustainable solutions. To participate, they also need good information about how to move forward and what those actions would mean.

“I think people are asking those questions: Why aren’t we there yet?” she said. “[CityOne] tries to show those building blocks and the affects of those missteps.”

So far, Boinodiris said thousands of people worldwide from several different industries have already played CityOne.

And gamers want more. She said she’s already gotten requests to expand the game with more SimCity-style gameplay, effectively allowing players to build cities from scratch. Players even suggested integrating real-time city data to add to the challenge of preparing municipalities for the future.

“They’re really putting the gauntlet down,” Boinodiris said.

Although she said this was the company’s “very first small steps” into a city simulation, she didn’t leave out the possibility for future editions, pointing out that it’s “inevitable” that corporations will pursue this type of marketing to get their messages across.

“It’s not a ‘what if?’ or ‘will it happen?’” she said. “It’s already happening.”

But businesses aren’t the only ones interested. Game designers like Jane McGonigal, who delivered a speech at a TED conference in 2010, believe gaming’s ability to harness a player’s problem-solving ability will be useful when tackling complicated issues.

“We’ve evolved technology to a point where we can do some good,” Brabham said.

Brabham even imagines the potential for groups like the Republican and Democratic national committees to create games allowing voters to explore the long-term impacts on the country if candidates are elected. Ideas like this, he said, can be an effective way to hear through the chatter.

“[Gaming] really holds a lot of democratic potential,” Brabham said. “It’s such a productive way to get a lot of people engaged.”

Tyler Dukes is a freelance reporter and journalism adviser at N.C. State University. Follow him on Twitter as @mtdukes.