Truth and Lies

Borrowing from the much-loved "Space Invaders" game, "Truth Invaders" asks players to lob rockets from the White House at lies circling above; meanwhile, the lies retaliate with their own missiles, which punch holes in the truths on the ground. As your aim improves, you gradually chip away at the lies, and if you're skillful enough, the truth is revealed before you lose.

Bernstein, who is both an LA-based game designer and writer, admits that he could have conveyed a similar message with a political cartoon. However, it wouldn't have had the same impact. "When you play the game, you become much more invested," he explains. "A game like this also has what I call the 'spoonful of sugar effect.' I could lecture people about these same ideas and half of them would be bored out of their minds in about a minute. But when you play this kind of game, you have sugar covering an important civics lesson."
 
Bernstein's game joins a growing genre of projects called serious games, which tackle significant issues with the goal of combining the pleasures and emotional investments of gaming with the critical thinking needed to solve more significant issues. Other current examples include the alternate reality game Superstruct, which launched a few weeks ago; here, players from all over the world are invited into an alternate reality - in this case, the world in 2019 when the world is ravaged by disease, hunger and political unrest. In this case, "playing" means creating a character - yourself in 10 years - and contributing stories and ideas to solve the problems at hand. A project of the Institute for the Future and its Ten-Year Forecast program, "Superstruct" is an experiment that bears watching.

Other serious games include The Free Culture Game, by the Italian collective Mollendustria. Subtitled "a playable theory," the game invites players to keep ideas away from copyright, circulating in the free zone, and the game play is structured such that players actually learn valuable ideas about sharing information and working together in what initially appears to be a very simplistic game.

"Truth Invaders" also initially seems simple and even whimsical with its retro graphics and easy-to-use functionality. However, the information is important, as is the process of working through the lies to find truths. "I think there's some element of catharsis in blowing these lies up," says Bernstein. "You feel good about finding the truth; you feel like you're achieving something. And I think these are things that people should be talking about in the next two weeks a lot."