The games industry should look beyond its reliance on dystopian worlds and use its extraordinary world-building power to help people imagine and create better futures, according to Alan Gershenfeld, President and Co-Founder of E-Line Media.
By Jude Ower
The games industry should look beyond its reliance on dystopian worlds and use its extraordinary world-building power to help people imagine and create better futures, according to Alan Gershenfeld, President and Co-Founder of E-Line Media.
In conversation with Mathias Gredal Nørvig and I, Alan argues that the worlds created by games matter because they help shape society’s expectations of the future. “The world right now is scary for a lot of people,” he says. “Popular media shapes our vision of the future, and then we shape the future often around those visions. But if we're just seeing dystopian visions of the future, it's reinforcing the fear and the overwhelming nature of what's happening in the world.”
Alan challenges developers to create futures that are neither dystopian nor unrealistically utopian, but “evocative, aspirational and achievable”. Games, he argues, are particularly powerful because they give players agency: the opportunity to make choices, experience consequences, fail and try again. “In a game world, you have agency - your actions matter, you make a difference.”
In our conversation, he explores that philosophy, and discusses games’ potential for real-world social impact, as well as AI and the future of game-making, and why helping the next generation imagine different futures matters so much.
This interview – hosted by Jude Ower and Mathias Gredal Nørvig - has been edited and condensed from the original Good Game Club podcast for length and clarity.
Mathias Gredal Nørvig: Welcome, Alan Gershenfeld. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your role at E-Line Media?
I'm Alan Gershenfeld, I'm President and Co-Founder of E-Line Media. We're a developer and publisher of games that have meaningful themes, authentic voices. I'm also a co-founder of Endless Studios, where we seek to empower the next generation of game makers through some innovative processes.
Jude Ower: Your background is in Activision, but before gaming you were in film and screenwriting; what was the pivotal moment for you, where you joined the dots between gaming and social impact?
I didn't really grow up a gamer. You know, we had an Atari 2600, and I played pong when it first came out. I'm that old. But I wouldn't have identified myself at all as a gamer. But I was passionate about stories and the power of stories.
I was a film critic in Hong Kong and was transitioning to screenwriting when I got a call from this guy, Bobby Kotick, who had just acquired Activision with his room-mate Howard Marks, and another guy named Brian Kelly, for not a lot of money, I think was less than a half $1 million. It was basically a bankrupt company.
They had this fairly prescient vision that games are going to become much more powerful entertainment experiences. And they’re going to need to marry game designers and programmers with writers and artists and animators. So, they moved down to Hollywood. They hired me from the film industry.
When I got the call, I was dating a girl at the time, who's now my wife of more than 25 years, and she was more of a gamer than I was. And she loved adventure games. And so she had me play ‘King's Quest,’ ‘It Came From The Desert’ and ‘Leisure Suit Larry,’ and I got really into these games. I was like, this is a player-driven narrative, I have agency in this world. It was a really interesting way to look at storytelling. And so, I went into the interview all excited about really, the three games I had just played and I became Head of Creative Affairs at Activision.
I went from Head of Creative Affairs to Head of Production to actually running the studio in LA, over about seven years. Over that time, I was watching literally the hundreds of millions and then billions of lean-forward hours of people playing our games and other games, it was just clear this is an incredibly powerful medium for both good and bad.
I really wanted to understand all that this medium could do to engage and empower people in positive ways, but also understand some of the negative consequences of games. But after seven years, I felt like I couldn't keep working on games that that weren't doing more than just make money and entertain. I wanted to do more.
I left actually to focus on businesses that were double bottom line, meaning that there's a financial bottom line and a social impact bottom line. Sometimes it's triple bottom line where they put an environmental layer, sometimes it's called blended value. It's kind of a new sector for impact investing. It’s finding the organic alignment of a business model and a social impact, so that the impact and the business can grow together.
And I had a chance to speak on that at the World Economic Forum at Davos, and I happened to be at a dinner, I think it was a UN dinner where Suzanne Seggerman, one of the Co-Founders of Games for Change, sat next to me. I was like, ‘Wow, there's a nonprofit called Games for Change?’ It had just started. I joined the board and became chairman of the board. And that was really the transition where I really immersed myself in games for impact.
Mathias Gredal Nørvig: “Impact,” of course, can mean a lot of things; what does “impact” mean to you in the wider context of games?
Every game makes an impact, whether intentional or not. I think we're talking about games where there is an intentional impact beyond just the entertainment or commercial value.
There's no one type of impact that games for impact make. When we do an impact game or a game that has goals beyond just entertainment, it's really what the stakeholders want to accomplish and how they want to measure that in whatever form. So, the range of impact is quite broad. It might be just creating awareness. It might be deepening understanding. It might be driving towards a behaviour change, an individual behaviour change or perhaps a collective behaviour change.
Most of our games are funded by impact investors, because E-Line is a for-profit, mission-driven company. When we talk to impact investors, you know, we find out what is the impact that you're driving for. How do you want to measure it? What is your risk tolerance? And each of our projects have a different answer to that question.
Mathias Gredal Nørvig: One of the examples you’ve talked about in the past is ‘Never Alone.’ Can you explain what impact does a game like that drive?
We got contacted by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council. It's one of 11 Alaska Native tribal organizations. Their culture had been terribly misrepresented in games and popular media. And their young people play a lot of games. So, they were playing games and they were not only not seeing their culture, they were seeing their culture misrepresented in popular media.
They presented a challenge to us: could we make a game not so much about their culture, but made with their culture that was genuinely authentic and appealed to a global audience? So, it wasn't a game specifically for their youth. It was for a global audience, but so that their youth could see their culture authentically represented. And could they make a whole bunch of money.
That's a tall order. I mean, for folks that work in the game industry, it's a high-risk business. It's a very complex business. And it's not just the development side. It's the publishing side. It's everything.
Rather than just jump in, we did six months of research where first of all, we immersed ourselves in the culture because we had to really understand the culture before we even proposed what type of game we could make.
We got 36 Alaska Native elders, writers and storytellers. We went on a very complex two-year journey, spent a lot of time up on the North Slope of Alaska, and we put out this little indie game. It really is in the Iñupiat language. It really is a story passed down thousands of years.
We've had 15 million players. We won a BAFTA; we won a Peabody. We're in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. We're in the Smithsonian. And probably most interestingly, the tribe took their profits, became our largest investor. became our largest investor. Our chairwoman, ten years later, is head of the Tribal Council. We're doing a sequel. We're doing a movie.
Jude Ower: Why do you think they started with games, instead of film or TV? Do you think there’s a deeper element to the storytelling in games?
Games let you step into the shoes of a different character. That alone is powerful. That's empathy. If it's done well, you can step into the shoes of a young the Iñupiat girl, a marine scientist. There's so many different characters that you can then embody, and that in itself is really powerful.
As you embody a character, you go into a problem space, you have challenges, and then you have agency. I often talk games are about verbs, thinking verbs, action verbs, some combination.
In a game world, you have agency - your actions matter, you make a difference.
You go into the problem space, you make decisions, you make choices, you act, you do things, and you fail safely. Not only do you fail safely, you fail evocatively.
And then this is one of the amazing things that game designers do, which is when you fail, you get feedback. You get feedback from the game, you get feedback from peers, you get feedback from mentors, to figure out how to get to the next level. If you think about that whole flow, that's learning, that's behaviour change. If it’s well executed, it's unbelievably powerful.
Jude Ower: Do you think we'll see more of the AAA large studios stepping into the meaningful game space? What are the blockers or barriers to them doing more meaningful games - is it cultural, structural, commercial?
I think the commercial industry is the commercial industry. They're going to have their strategy to meet their financial goals, to meet their investor goals, to meet their stakeholder goals, which are mostly financial goals, but often they’re entertainment goals.
The simple answer is if a game that has an impact objective becomes commercially very, very successful, I predict you'll see more of those. Because folks tend to follow what's commercially successful.
Now, it's a very cluttered market out there. You have to do something really distinct to rise above the noise. You have to do something special. Having a really interesting impact thesis, if it's really organic to the genre and the game mechanic, I could see something being a breakthrough there.
This is a creative medium. And the folks that lead these teams, the creative directors of the team and the leads around them, the lead programmer, lead designer, lead artists, these are amazing craftspeople. If they, especially as an individual or a team, really have a passion for a game that has an impact that they care about, but also can meet the commercial P&L objectives, then we will see breakthrough stuff. And you do see this, starting to see it in games, and you certainly have seen it in movies. I do believe that it will happen in the game industry, because a lot of the game makers are getting older, they’re thinking about this crazy world we live in and how can they make a difference. What is their legacy? But it's finding the right creative team, with the right studio, with the right business model and having it all come together. But I think it'll happen. I'm optimistic.
Jude Ower: How do you think the games industry can do more partnerships and inspire and encourage more meaningful games or games that can make an impact?
if you take something like all the work the Playing for the Planet is doing with their Green Game Jam and a number of other interesting games that are out there that are overt in terms of you're playing the game, but then you go into a real-world impact. Whether you're planting a tree, signing a petition, doing some sort of impact. That's a whole interesting area of when your agency jumps from your agency in a game to your agency in the real world. And I think we're just scratching the surface there, because a lot of these games and these game jams are showing there's a real interest in doing it.
There's been lots of money raised. Lots of trees planted, lots of actions that have happened. But what's kind of missing is the next step, because in games you act, you get feedback and then you keep levelling up to more challenges. Here you often do one act, and then I don't really know what the impact of that act was individually or collectively. Did I really make a difference? I think what's missing is the game design of the feedback loops of, ‘Oh, I did this and oh, we lit up this whole area, or this whole coral reef got built back up,’ and I can see that happening.
I think the idea of building on those real-world actions, making it playful, giving you the feedback loop, still having the virtual gameplay in the real world start to seamlessly work together. ‘Pokémon Go’ is another lens on it. Blending the virtual with the real world, building these actions, then you can start to talk about collective action, and you can get very provocative. I think we're starting to scratch the surface of the power of games kind of going in that direction.
Jude Ower: You mentioned about being a Co-Founder of Endless Studios. I think it's so fascinating in terms of youth as makers and creators and how that feeds into the future of work and skills. Could you just tell us a bit more about that, and what the big overall vision and ambition is?
When I joined the board and became Chairman of the board of Games for Change, I was seeing a lot of funding coming from governments, philanthropies, universities, family offices, non-profits, trying to harness the power games to do something. They were just early adopters coming on board. The problem was, not a lot was coming out the other end that was successful at reaching a lot of people or making impact. We were seeing a lot of failure points.
When we started E-Line, we actually started by serving as kind of a middle role between the foundations, the impact funders, and really bringing the rigor of the Activision development and publishing methodology. One of the first games we picked up was called Gamestar Mechanic. It teaches kids to make games. A lot of young kids want to make games, and when you make a game, it's really hard. It's systems thinking, it's design thinking, it's critical thinking.
We brought it to market; we had over 2 million games created by 8-12-year-olds. That led us to be able to partner with two teachers to do the educational version of Minecraft.
We got into about 20,000 schools. It was an amazing experience, but we realized that making games just has great learning and it cultivates great skills. And those job skills are not just for the game industry; they're for multiple industries.
The barriers to making games are coming down. We're finding there's millions, literally millions of game makers all over the world or aspiring game makers. But the question is, how do they break into the industry or adjacent industries?
A lot of what we're doing with Endless is, how do we bridge that divide, how do we help all these aspiring game makers, enabling lots of people with different talent to be able to work on games, get their first professional credit, and bring perspectives from around the world? We're doing that in partnership with Matt [Dalio, Founder of Endless Studios] through an investment fund, through an operating company.
Jude Ower: AI is going to be in every part of our lives; how can game creation help bring people along and be part of the AI revolution?
We have to integrate scaffolding around AI in all the game making. It's affecting every pathway, the coding pathway, the design pathway, the art pathway, the marketing pathway. But how to do it responsibly? This is what the industry is grappling with.
The skill or the disposition that will always be there, even with AI, is problem solving. If you're curious, if you can problem solve, if you're resilient, you'll survive all these crazy changes, because there's always going to be problems to solve. And they're going to be solved with different tools and different challenges, and they'll constantly be there. And then there's all the teamwork, the communication, the collaboration. You combine all that. And you're right, to duck and say, ‘I don't want to think about it’ is not doing the right thing by the next generation.
Mathias Gredal Nørvig: There's so much productivity gains to be had or even rethinking. Do we always need to grow everywhere? The more we can help people design or decide which direction they want to take their lives, the better.
With all of this, we have to always be minimizing the harm and maximizing the benefits. The extremes aren't helpful. It's not all bad, and it's not all good. It's a nuanced, textured thing. There won't be a cure for this accelerating technology. It's going to come. We just have to manage it the best we can. And it's nuanced. We have to have productive tensions and not unproductive tensions when we do it.
Jude Ower: What do you think is the one challenge that we've got that games are really well suited to either solve or to enable people to act on?
I've been thinking a lot about this, and I did a presentation, I think, a year ago at games for change on this. The world right now is scary for a lot of people. I was looking at all the future-facing AAA games, and pretty much everyone was dystopian right now. And these are massive AAA games in massive worlds. Literally billions of hours of lean-forward time in dystopian worlds, let alone the game makers spending years building these dystopian worlds.
If when we think about the future, we actually think about the future based on books we've read, movies, TV, video games, I mean, popular media shapes our vision of the future, and then we shape the future often around those visions. But if we're just seeing dystopian visions of the future, it's reinforcing the fear and the overwhelming nature of what's happening in the world.
So, the thought experiment, to answer your question is: can we create equally evocative - I wouldn't say utopian because I think utopian worlds don't exist - but I would say evocative, aspirational and achievable visions of the future, which could be multiple and amazing visions, all the creativity there? And then can we build – to go back to the earlier part of this conversation - the individual and collective agency, to urge those futures into existence with the feedback loops that we're getting closer? That's the challenge that I would love to see.
Mathias Gredal Nørvig: In order to change the future, you have to be able to imagine it. If everyone who is imagining it is turning the wrong way, how do we help with some glimmer of hope or some aspects that also allow that agency to grow?
I talked to a number of the folks that worked on these big worlds, and there were some interesting answers. First of all, dystopian worlds have a little bit more conflict. Stories have conflict. You need to have interesting conflict in stories. Dystopian worlds are often visually really evocative.
So those are two interesting questions: can you create aspirational worlds that still have interesting conflict? Sure. Can you make them visually interesting? When you're building a massive open world, it's hard to fully populate it. And so often it's like, well, we'll make it post-apocalyptic. We'll have some zombies and some stray cats! So, there were some production reasons why, in a huge open world, it's easy to make it post-apocalyptic and you use whatever game mechanics you're going to use. AI may help solve that, actually. So, I think it's a wonderful challenge and it literally could change the world because, as you say, if we can envision an evocative future, folks will want to urge it into existence.
Kids love to build worlds. They think about Marvel worlds. They think about worlds. I think world building should be in every school, because it's systems thinking, they can think about the future. They have to do research, and they can imagine these popular futures, starting in middle school and high school.
Watch or listen to the full conversation with Alan Gershenfeld on the Good Game Club podcast here Good Game Club Podcast - YouTube.
