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Ian Bogost

Video-game designer Ian Bogost is five-feet-two-inches-tall, with a beard and one eye that tends to wander off on its own. In fact, he looks a bit like a character-type one might choose in World of Warcraft or Everquest and dress up in medieval armor or maybe a leather jerkin. Bogost, 30, speaks five languages – English, French, German, Ancient Greek, and Latin, although he admits that his Latin isn't what it once was.

Bogost did not set out to become a game designer. He left home at 16 to become a stockbroker on Wall Street – "I don't know why," he says now, "it just seemed compelling" – and then at 17, his brokering days behind him, he set his mind on becoming a professor of literature (specialty: modern poetry). He headed to University of Southern California, primarily because the school would accept him even though he hadn't finished his senior year in high school.

While at UCLA getting his PhD in comparative literature, however, Bogost realized that he would never truly be satisfied unless he found a way of marrying his two loves – the discipline of critical thinking and the joy of technological tinkering. His dissertation quickly morphed from focusing exclusively on Baudelaire to also including critical analysis of the videogame Grand Theft Auto. His thesis became his first book: Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. (MIT Press, March 2006)

Today, Bogost is a professor of game studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology; president of the innovative and idiosyncratic game design company, Persuasive Games; and a prolific writer and speaker on videogames as a form of expression. He is one of the most interesting voices in an industry known for its technological savvy but not always for its critical thinking. It's an industry, after all, based on a medium that is only 35 years old and still struggling to figure out its identity. Like film 100 years ago, videogame vocabulary is still woefully underdeveloped, and whether or not videogames constitute an art form is still hotly debated. This is why someone like Bogost is so important.

Fatworld

"Videogames are a form of expression just like film or literature," Bogost likes to say, "and as such they are just as capable of dealing with issues that are complex, difficult or disturbing." In fact, Bogost believes that videogames, by putting players in the shoes of the protagonist, are uniquely suited to foster empathy, and that by the very fact of what they are – computational models of complex systems – they can help us understand how this complex and interconnected world of ours works.

These are ideas that have been flying around the more thoughtful corners of the industry for years. It's Bogost, however, who seems to be breaking through both in terms of explaining them to the mainstream as well as showing them in action. He recently went on The Colbert Report to discuss his new book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, (MIT Press, August 2007), and in May The New York Times Online signed him to produce videogames for its online editorial pages.

Bogost first caught the public attention with a game called Disaffected! about a bunch of bored-out-of-their-minds copy shop employees. The point of the game was not to kill customers or blow up copy machines, but rather to show how dreadfully mind numbing dead-end jobs can be. He followed up with Oil God, in which players have three minutes to jack up the worldwide price of oil by doing things like starting civil wars, bombing random countries, and facilitating natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanoes. Airport Security has players attempt to board an airplane while the rules of what can and cannot be brought on board change every few seconds. Both games are absurdist opinion pieces at heart, which is exactly what Bogost intended.

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Oil God

Since starting with the Times, Bogost has done Food Import Folly, where players are FDA inspectors trying to keep contaminated food out of the country and Points of Entry, where players have to compete for Green Cards under the immigration legislation proposed by Congress earlier in the year.

Not only are Bogost's games political and intellectually challenging, but also they're made to be accessible even to non-gamers. With a team of three, Bogost's games are built in Flash and are browser-based, which simply means that they don't have to be downloaded but rather are available the moment the hosting Web page is opened. Also, many computer games require high-powered PCUs or expensive graphics card to work, but Bogost's games are so small that anyone with Internet access can play them. If you've never played a videogame in your life, you can play one of Bogost's games. "They are the smallest kind of game I can imagine making that would still be coherent and have something to say," Bogost says. "You could compare them to short films."

While most people have yet to catch on that the videogame ecosystem includes more than just shoot 'em ups, Bogost is at the forefront of exploring all the different forms videogames can take. The next game from Persuasive Games, due out later in the year, is a longer and more robust offering than his editorial fare for The Times, which rarely run longer than three minutes. It's called Fatworld, and it's about the politics of food and nutrition in America. Bogost says if his editorial games are the equivalent of short movies, than "Fat World," which is funded by PBS, is more like a documentary.

Airport Security

Like experimental, short and documentary filmmakers before him, Bogost has little interest in making big blockbusters. He's far more interested in solving some of the technological problems game makers still face. For example, while the videogame industry is at the forefront of solving 3D graphics and simulation problems, AI has proven to be more challenging. "Whereas simulating physics is a totally solved problem," Bogost says, "Simulating ideology is an unsolved problem."

Bogost wants to build characters that have worldviews that would influence the decisions they make, which would in turn influence the player's experience and, possibly, his or her opinions.

"There's very little primary research in the games business," Bogost says. "Electronic Arts doesn't invest in R&D of this kind. So rather than throw up my hands, I have this totally unproven hope that I'll be able to solve some of these problems on the research front and toss it back out into the game world."

It sounds audacious, but then this is the guy who convinced The New York Times to start including videogames on its editorial page.

Heather Chaplin is a NY-based journalist. She is the author of Smartbomb:The Quest for Art, Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution and writes regularly about digital culture and business for the New York Times, L.A. Times, GQ, Details and "All Things Considered," among other publications.