Introduction

When Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor at Georgia Tech University, decided to make a serious computer game that would explore the ideological undertones of complex political issues, he and fellow professor Michael Mateas selected what they believed w as the most complex, murky and divisive subject in the United States: abortion.

Talk about a tall order. Bogost and Mateas, who also help run the Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Tech, recently began working on the serious game, which Bogost hopes will help players comprehend and digest various points of view on the hot-button issue.

Speaking at the Game Developer Conference's Serious Game Summit in San Jose Monday, Bogost said hopes to build a complex, accurate and multi-layered simulation using a case-based architecture coupled with artificial intelligence.

"We wanted to do this topic justice," Bogost told his audience. "We didn't want to do something gimmicky. We needed a way to represent the ideology of the issue itself."

But the question is, why? Bogost simply believes in the concept of games as communication tools. In addition to his time in the classroom and the lab at Georgia Tech, he is also a partner and co-founder at game developer Persuasive Games and co-editor of Water Cooler Games, a Website dedicated to games for education, advertising and social expression.

Bogost and Persuasive Games have earned notoriety with titles such as The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first ever U.S. presidential election game, and Disaffected!, an "anti-advergame" parody that rips FedEx Kinko's copy stores. Bogost says it's all in the name of communication; he wants people to play and exchange ideas and experiences.

"The most interesting thing I get out of these games is what I read in the blogs," Bogost said at the GDC. "The games are designed to encourage discourse."

Next is a discourse between Bogost and TwitchGuru Managing Editor Rob Wright.