Digital games for international development: A field theory perspective

Abstract

While serious games have been used within the field of international development since 2005, their adoption as tools for social and behavior change has remained fairly limited. Using Bourdieu’s theory of practice as an analytical framework, this study examines the tensions created when the fields of international development and serious games are brought together. In-depth interviews with development practitioners and game experts responsible for creating the nonprofit Half the Sky Movement’s mobile phone and Facebook games are used to examine how logistical considerations and ideological conflicts between agents from differing fields shape the limitations and possibilities of bringing games into the development space. Further, this study analyzes the new forms of Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capital created through this overlap in fields, filling an existing gap in the extant literature on the production and use of games for international development.

Keywords

Field theory Games for Change international development serious games

Introduction

While serious games—digital games designed for a primary purpose other than entertainment—have been used within the field of international development since 2005, their adoption as tools for social and behavior change has remained fairly limited. That seemed poised to change in 2013 with the release of the nonprofit Half the Sky Movement’s suite of games designed as awareness raising, fundraising, and behavior change tools. The games, which took on issues including pregnancy health and the perception of women’s value in their families, were designed to further the movement’s mission of empowering women and girls all over the world. In response to the project’s Facebook and three mobile phone games, aimed at players in the US, India, and Kenya, many were ready to declare digital games the new frontier for international development and advocacy work (see Sydell, 2013). And yet, the challenges encountered in the production and dissemination of these games tell a more complex story, one in which both logistical considerations and ideological conflicts between agents in the international development and serious games fields shape the limitations and possibilities of bringing games into the development space.

Using Bourdieu’s theory of practice as an analytical framework, this study examines the struggles and possibilities created when the international development field and serious games field are brought together through the production of digital games as development tools. The bringing together of these fields, each of which can be understood as a self-governing space guided by internal rules and logics, also means a bringing together of agents with distinct goals, priorities, and worldviews. Examining how agents from each field understand the use and value of digital games as tools for development has important implications not only for the future of games in the development space, but also for our understanding of how the overlap in fields created by the introduction of new technologies determines new forms of Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capital within the field of development.

Serious games designed to achieve social change issues have been positioned by agents in the games field as a disruptive technology that can ‘change the world’ (see Burak and Parket, 2017; McGonigal, 2010). But games designed for international development goals must be examined within the historical context of the development field in which games are the newest media tool in a long and well researched line of mass communication and, more recently, Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). Familiarity with this context has important implications for how agents from inside and outside of the development field understand the role of games and their usefulness as development solutions.

Existing research on the use of games in the international development field focuses on the development agendas of games (Fisher, 2016, 2017) or on the individual-level effects of games on players (Dasgupta et al., 2012; Kam et al., 2009). Little research, however, focuses specifically on the production and use of digital games for international development. As such, this study fills an important gap in the extant literature. Employing Bourdieu’s theory of practice as an analytical framework, this study uses in-depth interviews with development practitioners and game developers involved with the Half the Sky Movement’s game projects to emphasize not only the specific complicating factors that arise when making and disseminating games aimed at achieving development goals, but also the implications of bringing together the fields of serious games and international development.

In the following section, literature from the fields of development communication, Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D), and games studies is presented in order to frame the discussion of serious games for international development within the broader historical context of technology use in the development field and current use of serious games for social change.

Literature review

Mass communication tools, from radio to satellite television, have long played a role in the international development field. Traditional mass communication technologies, described as ‘agents of behavioral, attitude and knowledge changes’ for audiences (Fair, 1989: 129) have been presented as tools for achieving development goals around a variety of issues at both individual and community levels throughout the history of the development industry (Fair and Shah, 1997; Lerner, 1958; Rao, 1963; Rogers, 1976; Schramm, 1964; Singhal and Rogers, 1999). The rapid growth and availability of ICTs from the mid-1980s onward led to a shift away from traditional media in favor of the use of newer technologies in the development field (James, 2005; Ogan et al., 2009; Walsham, 2017).

While research over the last 20 years has recognized ICTs ‘as important tools in the alleviation of poverty in a sustainable manner, in enhancing economic development and in empowering marginalized sections of the population’, critical scholarship has noted that ICTs can act as a ‘double-edged sword that can be used to transform and liberate but also to exclude women, deepen the digital divide and reproduce existing inequalities’ (Ogan et al., 2009: 665–666). As Leye (2009) argues, taking a critical approach to the study of ICT4D does not negate the fact that ‘ICT4D activists, whether in government, academia, civil society, or even business, are usually driven by the best of intentions’, but it does bring to the forefront important critiques of ICT4D that have been ignored or erased within the development industry (p. 29).

New communication technologies are often presented in the development space as a ‘magic solution’ or ‘holy grail’, the mere introduction of which will have a transformative effect on people’s lives (Ogan et al., 2009: 667). Many new technology-based development projects have ‘been hailed because of their “promise of universal concord, decentralized democracy, social justice and general prosperity” but subsequently failed in terms of delivering more development’ (Leye, 2009: 29). As such, the introduction of new technologies to the development field must be analyzed according to their ‘unique properties, applications and possibilities, as well as challenges’ (Kwami et al., 2011: 541). Thus, a critical assessment of the production and use of serious games for development is worthwhile, especially as proponents of serious games present them as key technologies for saving the world (see, for instance, McGonigal, 2010).

Research on digital games has shown their potential for increasing knowledge, delivering persuasive messaging, and effecting individual behavior change (Gee, 2005, 2007; Klimmt, 2009; Shaffer, 2004; Swain, 2007, 2010). Thus, using games for international development projects focused on educational, behavioral, and/or attitudinal change goals seems ripe with possibility. Since 2005, bilateral and multilateral development institutions, NGOs, and global corporations have funded the production of games designed to achieve a variety of development goals (Fisher, 2016). Existing research on game-oriented development projects shows that games have been used (with varying effects) in attempts to improve literacy levels for school children in rural India (Kam et al., 2009), to increase knowledge around pregnancy health for women in Kenya (Dasgupta et al., 2012), and to connect youth across Southern Africa and equip them with 21st-century skills (Fisher, 2016). While there is some, albeit limited, research on the effectiveness of individual games designed for achieving specific project goals, we have yet to see any research on the broader implications of bringing this new technology into the development field. Because digital games require specific resources and expertise to create, the introduction of games to the development field also means the introduction of agents and logics from the serious games field. This study highlights the possibilities and tensions created by this overlap in fields and practitioners.

Development organizations and NGOs play an important part in determining the role of technology in projects as they have the institutional means necessary to provide access to information and resources not otherwise available (Klabbers and Kruiderink, 2007). But it is the individual practitioner who ultimately plays the role of ‘technology steward’, through which ‘specific technological expertise is provided to a community, based on its particular needs’ (White et al., 2007: 2). Ideally, this role involves not only the delivery and distribution of the technology, which necessitates ‘dealing with diverse access to technology and infrastructures, fostering collaboration between different cultures, languages and discourses’, but also presumes an attentiveness to ‘the cultural biases and power relationships that are embedded in the tools and the practice’ (White et al., 2007: 2). Whether this happens on the ground varies as the development industry embeds practitioners in a system of assumed expertise and authority that reinforces a North/South divide and works to make power structures invisible (Cornwall, 2003; Craig and Porter, 1997; Escobar, 1995, 1997; Ferguson, 1994; Parpart, 1995). Further, desire on the part of practitioners to question a system from which they benefit varies (Craig and Porter, 1997; Ferguson, 1994).

Nevertheless, practitioners have a specific vantage point from which to observe and critique the role of digital games for development. Their insights on the intended and actual use of digital games, including their perceptions of possibilities and limitations, provide an important source of information for the current and future state of development games. The ways in which this perception is shaped comes in part from practitioners’ positioning within the development field, as the internal rules and logics of the field itself work to inform the worldview of the agents within it. The same is true for agents within the serious games field who have a vested interest in finding new uses and markets for the technologies they create (Castronova, 2005; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009). The following section outlines Bourdieu’s theory of practice as an analytical framework for understanding the development field and the implications of introducing a new technology, and actors, from another field into it.

Field theory

Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977), comprised of the concepts of field, capital, and habitus, can be used as both a theoretical and analytical framework (Chavez, 2012; Schultz, 2007). According to Bourdieu, society is made up of fields that are related to and influenced by one another, but function according to their own internal rules and logics. Fields are semi-autonomous, hierarchical spaces that operate, to a degree, distinct from one another, while also being constituted and determined by the social dynamics and structures of power surrounding it. According to Bourdieu, fields must be analyzed and understood through empirical investigations. As such, this study analyzes the limitations and potentialities created when the fields of international development and serious games are brought together.

When digital games are presented as tools for solving international development problems, the serious games field and its agents are brought (along with the games themselves) into the development field. Because fields are spaces that function according to their own rules and logics, the bringing together of two fields is also the bringing together of two disparate structures and ways of operating. This new space created by the overlap in fields creates both challenges and opportunities. Bourdieu (1993) understands fields themselves as dynamic spaces that are at once a ‘field of struggle’ and a ‘space of possibles’ which come, in part, from the hierarchical positioning of agents and the competition for capital within a field. The incongruency created by introducing new agents, and along with them new forms of habitus and capital, into a field also works to create sites of struggle and possibility.

An agent’s ability to take up and operate according to the habitus of the field has a determining effect on her ability to compete for positions of power and resources within it. The concept of habitus speaks to the naturalized ‘set of dispositions that incline social agents to act and react in certain ways’, leading to the professional ‘practices, perceptions and attitudes’ that become embedded in a field and key to an agent’s success (Chavez, 2012: 310). In this case, the concept of habitus can be used to understand how development practitioners and game developers, whose fields call for different forms of professional practice and different ways of seeing the world, understand the possibilities and limitations of digital games as solutions for international development problems.

The introduction of new agents from new fields has the potential to disrupt the status quo, potentially introducing new forms of capital along with new rules and logics. As agents within a given field compete to gain and hold on to capital—economic, social, cultural, and symbolic—maintaining the status quo is in the best interest of those in dominant positions. But new agents entering one field from another bring with them new forms of capital and habitus. To be successful, these new agents must either learn to adapt to the habitus of their new field and acquire the forms of capital prioritized there or disrupt the structure of the field in such a way that the forms of capital they hold carry over and carry weight.

Like the fields of journalism, and arts and sciences, the fields of international development and serious games can be understood as fields of cultural production—fields that produce ‘symbolic goods’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 115). As Willig (2008) explains, ‘the fields of cultural production are fields which are constantly constructing, creating, making the different social categories…The field of cultural production is in other words a field, where the ongoing game defines the right to produce legitimate, symbolic descriptions of reality’ (p. 11). Indeed, the entire concept of a field of international development is rooted in the construction of the Third World (Escobar, 1995). As a concept, the Third World presents elements of difference, need, hierarchy, and power as a description of reality that creates the need for a field of international development. And the development field must constantly produce the concept of the Third World, the issues facing it, and relevant solutions in order for the field to continue (Escobar, 1995). It is a process-oriented field with an emphasis on expert technical knowledge in which development agents are seen as key to defining and solving development goals (Escobar, 1995; Ferguson, 1994; Ojha et al., 2005).

Not unlike the field of journalism or the field of advertising, the field of serious games can also be understood as a field of cultural production as it produces symbolic goods that act as ‘both a commodity and a symbolic object’ (Chavez, 2012: 310). Through the marketing of its games, game content, and in the framing of games as solutions to pressing social issues, the field of serious games produces and disseminates messages that present specific categories and visions of the world. While the serious games field is relatively young, it operates according to its own rules and logics. Similar to other technology-driven fields, it thrives on concepts of innovation and disruption.

As Bourdieu (1993) explains, the fields of cultural production are ‘the site of the struggles for the monopoly of the power to consecrate…’ (p. 78). Thus, within the fields of cultural production are struggles for symbolic power; struggles to categorize and divide the social world; struggles for ‘the right to recognize and acknowledge certain themes, institutions, and agents (Bourdie and Thompson, 1991; Bourdieu, 1989, 1996 [1994])’ (Willig, 2008: 11). It is in this context that we must understand the interactions between the agents from two distinct fields—the international development field and the serious games field—as they conceptualize the role of digital games for solving development problems. Using Bourdieu’s framework, this study analyzes the international development and serious games industries as professional fields working with but also contesting one another for the right to create legitimate solutions for development issues.

Method

This research uses Bourdieu’s theory of practice as an analytical framework to examine how the positioning of agents in the fields of international development and serious games informs their understanding and support for digital games as a tool for development. The production and dissemination of the Half the Sky Movement’s game projects (which included a Facebook game developed as an awareness and fundraising tool for audiences in the US and three mobile phone games designed as tools for education and behavior change for audiences in India and Kenya) are used as a case study.

The Half the Sky Movement (the Movement), a transmedia project aimed at creating a global movement to end the oppression of women and girls, also included a website, documentary, and educational videos all based on the bestselling book ‘Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide’ by authors Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof. The games were produced by the nonprofit organization Games for Change at the behest of Kristof and WuDunn, the Movement’s founders.

Multiple sources of data were used in this study, including content from the Movement’s website; game project evaluations and other reports published by the Movement; publications featuring interviews with the Movement and game project leaders; and in-depth interviews with central members of the Movement’s game projects. In total, six key individuals involved with the game projects participated in semistructured, in-depth phone interviews. Interviews lasted between one and two hours, were digitally recorded to ensure an accurate representation of participants’ remarks, and were transcribed in full. IRB approval was obtained prior to data collection.

Participants included key individuals responsible for conceptualizing and producing the Movement’s games and key development practitioners responsible for managing and providing technical oversight for the game projects. Participants’ backgrounds included deep knowledge and experience in either the serious games or international development fields generally as well as with the Movement’s game projects specifically. The researcher relied on purposive sampling to target relevant individuals (Bryman, 2012) as well as snowball sampling (Manning and Kunkel, 2014) to identify and access participants who played a key role in the game projects. Interviews focused on participants’ reflections on the Movement’s game projects as well as the future role of games in international development. McCracken’s (1998) three-phase analytic framework was used to analyze the data.

Background

The Half the Sky Movement’s game projects included a Facebook game, designed for players in the US, and three mobile phone games, designed for players in India and Kenya. The Facebook game was launched in March 2013. In the three years it was live, the game brought in 1.3 million players and just over $500,000 in donations. Approximately 10% of total donations came from individual players, while the rest was donated by Johnson&Johnson and the Pearson Foundation. The Facebook game, which cost $600,000 to produce with an additional $600,000 spent on marketing and distribution, was funded primarily by the United Nations Foundation and the US-based Ford Foundation.

The three mobile phone games—9 Minutes, Family Values, and Worm Attack!—were designed as education and behavior change tools for players in India and Kenya. The games cost $295,000 to make and were funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). While initially the mobile phone games were used only in targeted projects working with specific NGOs, they were later bundled together with the Facebook game and the Movement’s documentary for two national-scale projects in India and Kenya. A total of $2,791,375 was spent on this larger transmedia project. The mobile phone games were downloaded 112,611 times across India and Kenya.

The Movement’s games provide an especially useful case study for understanding the struggles and possibilities created by an overlap between the fields of serious games and international development as the making of them brought together some of the world’s largest international development organizations (including USAID and the United Nations Foundation), commercial gaming industry giants (including Zynga and Frima Studio), and the leading organization working on games for social change, Games for Change. The following section presents findings from in-depth interviews with the development practitioners and serious game industry experts involved in the project to illuminate the ways in which these agents perceive the role of games in international development, and the tensions created between the fields with the introduction of game technology into the development space.

Findings

Designing games that could effectively and ethically represent various issues (including pregnancy health and women’s oppression), present engaging storylines around women’s empowerment, and generate changes in players’ knowledge and behavior required active participation by those invested in the field of international development as well as those versed in game design. But bringing together experts from such diverse fields spawned heated debates around the limitations and possibilities of games in achieving development goals and engendering social change. These debates have important implications for the future of games in international development, the relationship across development and gaming industries, and the obstacles to consider regarding the gamification of social change.

Using digital games as a tool for ending women’s oppression globally was conceived of by journalists and Movement founders Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. According to one of the game experts involved with the project, Kristof and WuDunn, ‘kind of, we just say got infected with the virus of doing games. They thought about it as a cool way to reach young audiences’. The game experts involved in this project approached the design of the Movement’s games according to an eight-step, audience-centric methodology developed by Games for Change. To develop effective games, they would have to work with ‘subject matter experts’ in the develop field who knew the audiences well and could consult on appropriate game content. To actually make the games, however, the game experts felt it necessary to ‘work with the best in the field’, those from the commercial gaming world who understood the nuance of game platforms and audiences’ ‘expectations in terms of quality and polish’ in a game. This was especially the case for the development of the Facebook game, which was originally intended to spread the Movement’s message to players in the US but was also later used in projects in India and Kenya.

Digital games present a new channel for delivering educational information in a compelling way. Further, if designed correctly, games can help effectively disseminate information to audiences with low levels of literacy. Game industry experts and development practitioners alike see the potential this brings to development projects. As a game expert noted, NGOs often use basic media, like paper brochures, to disseminate health intervention information at community centers. According to the game expert, such tactics are often ‘not very successful at conveying the information both because they [have] illiterate audiences and because they just [aren’t] very interesting to look at’. For the game experts, games present not only a more polished media format, but also a way to overcome literacy barriers. For instance, in designing a mobile game focused on pregnancy health, the game experts created an experience that allows players to ‘juggle different icons so it could be very visual’, in order to provide audiences of varying literacy levels with engaging content.

But while this approach proved effective in 9 Minutes, a pregnancy-health focused game, it was much more challenging to integrate this kind of visual play style into Family Values, a game focused on changing normative perceptions of the value of girls in families. Even though Family Values was designed for an audience similar to that of 9 Minutes, it is a game completely dependent on text-based narrative, making it unsuitable for non or low literate audiences. Thus, while digital games can be designed specifically for non-literate audiences, games in and of themselves are not necessarily suitable for overcoming literacy barriers.

Although the game experts did not intend for the Facebook game to be used with audiences in India and Kenya, development practitioners noted that some of the NGOs actually preferred using the Facebook game to the mobile phone games because they could project it on a screen and involve the whole community in playing together. Being able to pause the game periodically and have group discussions was seen as more engaging and productive than having people play independently on mobile phones. While the game experts assumed Facebook would not be a useful platform for reaching audiences in India and Kenya, when and where connectivity issues were overcome the platform actually presented important advantages to NGOs working to build discussion and community engagement.

Both game experts and development practitioners agreed that digital games provide a level of media production far beyond what most development projects have access to. NGOs are often working with limited budgets and small teams, and few have the resources to develop strong media material generally, let alone something as complex as a digital game. According to one development practitioner:

That’s why we need [game producers]. You can develop good tools that people can use because [NGOs] don’t have that. You go anywhere in the developing world where you have NGOs trying to do stuff, they don’t have good tools; they make crappy stuff. They never have enough budget, and to do something like [these games] is a goldmine.

Having these digital games to show audiences provided NGOs and their workers with a new form of social capital that gave them credibility with their audiences. And as the games were primarily about ‘loaded topics, with a lot of emotion behind some of these issues’ they made what would otherwise be awkward and taboo conversations with their community members easier to have. As another development practitioner noted:

In India, specifically…community health workers tend to have a low level of education. Having the [games and the short companion videos] almost validates what they’re saying. It makes it more authoritative; people have more time and respect for what they’re saying. It changes their perception in the community. They may not have the same sway [without the media]. It added more authority to their voice, and a new and creative way of engaging people.

Development practitioners noted that what is actually being said in the games is ‘not so very different than what [we’ve] been saying for the past five years’, but using games to instigate these conversations allowed NGO workers to ‘remove sensitive topics’ and ‘talk about them easier’. But while development practitioners often referred to the games as good ‘conversation starters’, they were skeptical of the ability of games to effectively deliver messages.

The development practitioners involved in the project understand games as having different levels of potential effectiveness depending on the development goal. As one practitioner noted, a simple game designed to raise awareness around an existing health intervention has a very different end-goal that may be easier to achieve through gameplay than normative, attitude change goals around issues like gender inequality. Further, the development practitioners involved do not see digital games as having the potential to generate effective education and behavior change results if not tied to a larger curriculum. As one practitioner noted

I think from our perspective we certainly think the games were a valuable tool, but not sufficient in-and-of themselves in addressing the larger side of issues they were supposed to target, because you really do need a more comprehensive approach in our view.

Thus, the practitioners developed a discussion guide and a series of short educational videos to be used along with the games. As one practitioner stated:

The things that require behavior change really do require more than just information provision…you also want some sort of engagement and dialogue around the different communication pieces that you’re working with. So individual gaming is great, but it lacked some of that community engagement. Now, I think when it’s paired with some of those other types of behavior change activities it certainly can be a powerful tool.

For the development practitioners involved, games work as one channel within a larger program—they add value, but are not effective in achieving education or behavior change goals on their own. Practitioners pointed to the need for multiple impressions as one obstacle preventing games from working effectively on their own. Ensuring people play often enough to achieve the necessary levels of contact is challenging, and issues of access to mobile phones made this even more difficult. As one practitioner noted:

Not to diminish the field of gaming as a whole, or the potential there, but you really have to have six or seven impressions or times to play with the game to really have messages resonate and the content resonate. And so, if you think about it, they may be borrowing someone’s phone [to play], and it’s hard, I think, to understand how that can be sustained.

Further, issues of gender play an important role in determining who is able to access mobile phones and play the games:

One of the things we’ve been looking at is—and I think this is true particularly with the Indian games—is even though you have certain statistics and certain information that lends you to believe that women are accessing phones, are able to, and have the phone literacy to be able to play these games – and they were the primary audience of many of these games –in practical terms, at least in India, often the phones are owned by men. Women have very limited access to it, they’re not accustomed, outside of urban areas, to playing games. In a subsequent project in India where we were looking at using these games further, we found it’s difficult.

While the Movement’s mobile phone games were originally developed for use by NGOs, they were later embedded in a multi-million-dollar, national-scale program meant to extend the reach of all of the Movement’s combined media. The games were made available to download through in-country app stores, creating an opportunity for the games to spread beyond those audiences involved with the partner NGOs. The development practitioners, however, did not see this as an effective use of the technology:

Yes, the games people thought that [the games could be used independently], and the Half the Sky [Movement] people thought that, but to me a tool is not anything that can be used by itself. This is what I kept arguing, and it’s like, yes, you might get some picked up, but…you have to have discussion; you have to have interaction with it. But it’s really hard to tell somebody your tool by itself isn’t going to save the world.

The debate around games as one channel in a larger curriculum versus games as a stand-alone tool proved to be a strong point of contention between development practitioners and those from the Movement and serious games field. As one development practitioner stated, ‘I kept saying, it’s not an intervention. It’s absolutely a tool, but it’s not an intervention. And [the Movement and games people] didn’t get that’. Such disagreements led to heated arguments and a division between agents around the potential for games in the development field. As one development practitioner said, ‘I was the villain many times trying to explain to them that you can’t just take a video or a game out to a village, these things don’t translate, and so you have to put them in different contexts, and so there was a lot of backing and forthing of who was smart and who wasn’t’.

For those working in the gaming industry, however, it felt at times that the development practitioners simply didn’t ‘get it’. As one participant from the serious games field commented, ‘I have to admit that I found sometimes people working in development a bit, how would I say it politely? They are kind of…they believe they know what is true’. According to one game expert, some of the limitations for using games as tools came from inabilities or lack of knowledge on the side of development experts:

Technology is improving, internet access is improving, but [using games is] still not a plug and play thing to do, even when you work with the NGO, even when you train them. I mean, I went personally to India and Kenya and I sat with the NGO people, I trained them, our gaming companies in-country helped them, but it’s still a big deal. It’s ironic, because it’s so much better than a brochure, but you know, it’s not as easy as handing people brochures.

Further, game experts saw the development practitioners’ inexperience with games and gaming conventions as a challenge when designing game content. Tensions came to a head a few months before the launch of the Facebook game when individuals from some of the affiliate NGOs ‘started to raise questions’. According to one game expert, ‘They’re not people that are used to playing games…Most of them, they don’t know Facebook games. They don’t know game conventions’. Development practitioners pushed back against the Facebook game’s narrative, concerned that it painted an overly simplistic picture of women’s empowerment. According to one game expert, some NGO partners ‘[were] like, “Oh my god, this game is teaching people that the problems could all go away by collecting mangoes!” That women’s empowerment is…that it’s as easy as collecting mangoes and it’s all good. And you know, I don’t think that was the message’. To appease critics, the game experts included a disclaimer in the game about the fictional nature of the characters and storylines. According to one game expert, the assumed expertise that high-level individuals in the development field working in NGO headquarters had about international audiences and their needs made designing good, effective games challenging:

Many in the development field believe they know what could be patronizing or condescending. While when you look at some of the NGOs on the ground, not the headquarters in the US, they have no problem with the content. They didn’t have a problem with the representation of the Indian people or the Indian women…but the NGO on the global level was kind of saying, ‘Oh, this is going to offend’.

As one game expert noted, however, the development organizations involved did not overlook the marketing value created by bringing games into their work: ‘It seems they have a lot of interest to put the fact that they’re doing games as the headline. You know? Like, show they are really pushing the boundaries’. But on both sides, a sense that agents from the other field did not have the expertise necessary to make the project work led to tensions between the fields and obstacles to achieving the project goals.

Digital games, even simple ones, take time and expertise to develop. This is especially true when designing games focused on solving complex social issues meant to achieve attitude or behavior change. And bringing in those from outside the development field to help generate development projects adds unique challenges. According to one game expert, developing the grants with USAID to fund the mobile games was a very long, difficult process. In discussing the process of having those from the Movement work with those in the development field to develop a funding structure for the games, the game expert spoke of the challenges of bringing groups outside of the development field into such a project:

Now, you understand, that [those from the Movement] never did it before. So part of the reason it took so much time, is that it’s not the language they speak. They’re not development people, you know? So as much as USAID wants to encourage grants coming from public-private partnership and people that are not in the [development] system, it was hard to do.

Trying to work with gaming companies in local contexts, a priority for development practitioners, also extended the length of the project and posed budgeting challenges. While Games for Change, the organization in charge of the production of the games, initially contracted with an Indian company to design the mobile phone games, they switched to a designer in the UK after experiencing delays and finding that the local gaming company was unable to meet certain organizational standards. It was also Games for Change and the Movement that prioritized working with established game designers to create the best-quality game content.

Organizations like the Movement that are spending substantial time and money on game-based projects and that expect games to be made to the highest global-industry standards may not be willing to work with local gaming companies if there is the perception that doing so might disrupt budget or timeline constraints or result in lower-quality output. But for development practitioners, working with local gaming companies in the future is key to both bringing down the cost of creating games and designing culturally appropriate, effective games. Further, continuing a major critique of ICT4D, the production of digital games for development also has important implications for the continuation of an unequal North/South power divide. As Parmentier and Huyer (2008: 13) note, ‘there is a difference between the acquisition of technology for use, and local innovation and production of technology’. The continued production of technology, including games, in the North for consumption in the South sustains what Innis (2007) refers to as ‘knowledge monopolies’. Further, the transfer of technology, and the information and ideas embedded in it, from North to South works to ‘privilege western ways of knowing’ (Kwami et al., 2011: 543).

While games are often hailed as revolutionary tools for social change, their production has the potential to reinforce, rather than disrupt, existing structures of power. And the current favoring of established game designers and producers in the Global North has implications for the growth of local gaming industries. In their meta-analysis of research on ICT4D, Ogan et al. (2009: 666) call for ‘more domestic innovation and local creation of ICTs’. This call reflects some of the earliest critical themes of ICT4D research (set forth in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s), which included an emphasis on the importance of local context, ‘participative and cooperative design’, and ‘the need for indigenous development’ of ICTs (Walsham, 2017: 21).

Development practitioners similarly see development and innovation in local gaming industries as key. According to one practitioner, it is imperative to work with local gaming companies as ‘So often, it’s the Indian companies that know the Indian arena, and the Kenyan companies that know the Kenyan arena’. And, as this development practitioner added, ‘Doing the heavy lifting [regarding the production of the games] in India or Kenya would obviously be a lot cheaper’, helping to perhaps curb budget considerations. Another practitioner had similar feelings around the need for more local development to both mitigate costs and create games that are more culturally relevant:

I think there are a lot of really strong local groups that are developing games in a, probably in a more cost effective way because they’re being done on the ground. And I think there is a lot of innovation happening right now around working with communities to design games. And I think that’s really interesting and you know if I had to do this again that would be the approach I would take, you know to really make sure you’re resonating with your audience and you’re developing something that’s interesting for them to play.

But, as evidenced by this project, when local gaming companies like the one in India are not producing according to conventional commercial standards, they may be let go in favor of gaming companies working within more established sectors of the industry.

According to one development practitioner, people considering games for development projects are generally misinformed as to what making a game actually entails: ‘There are a number of players that are involved in the process and it’s quite an expensive endeavor to develop games. People think games are cheap. They’re not’. Cost is the major barrier all of the development practitioners interviewed voiced in using games for development. Even when the practitioners themselves want to use games, they are at the mercy of budget restrictions placed on them by superiors, for whom the potential of games is often overshadowed by the cost:

You don’t find [games] built into the education work in the development world and I’m like why can’t we do this? They never gave us the budget to do it and I’m dying to do games, I love games…I’ve seen some fabulous games…but people in development still don’t quite get it.

Further, while game projects incur big price tags, because of the rapid pace of technology change, specifically within the mobile phone industry in the Global South, they have short-term shelf-lives. As one practitioner noted, ‘My big sticking point is how expensive they are and how short term they are. You develop for a Java phone, and then no one is using the Java phone. You develop apps and they don’t work on the Chinese phones, which is [the phone being used in] 90 percent of all developing countries’.

And developing games that can be transferred to broad audiences even within a single country presents challenges: ‘In a country like India you’ve got like eight plus languages. We’ve got [the game] in two. It’s pretty limiting’ said one practitioner. While games can broaden the number of people that can be reached by a project, ‘They weren’t going to be universally used. They still had limited exposure’. While this issue is relevant to even simple forms of media, like paper brochures or flyers, the cost of making a single game, let alone making many versions of it for diverse audiences, presents much bigger challenges.

Making games for development necessitates a partnership with both development experts, who understand the context and goals of development work, and game design experts, who have the technical skills to create games. But, according to one development practitioner, convincing game designers to actually create the types of games that are appropriate and accessible for their audiences can be challenging:

The problem with games in development is that you can do really wonderful games, but you are talking about technology that is sort of behind when you are doing stuff in development…It’s hard to get [game developers] to scale down all the cool stuff which has to be done to make it accessible.

According to one practitioner, even within the development industry itself, ‘There is definitely a digital divide. Some of the [NGOs/development organizations] are using [mobile phones], some of them aren’t, and they are still studying them like “do mobile phones work?” Yes of course they work. Why are we studying this, guys? Come on!’ The practitioner further noted that convincing those in charge, who are often older and perhaps less technically literate themselves, that mobile technology is effective can be difficult:

I get in these meetings and I will say ‘Why aren’t we using mobile technology?’ and I have all the young kids who are the assistants on the projects nodding their heads and the old people are like ‘Are you kidding?’…None of them know how to use that technology so they assume nobody does, and people still argue with you about reaching people in developing countries using phones…It seems so obvious, but it’s not.

Because of the high levels of technical expertise needed to produce, design, and distribute games, the use of digital games for development necessitates the input of various non-development practitioners throughout these projects. As seen in the Movement’s game projects, this overlap of industries can cause major challenges and tensions. Reflecting on the project, one practitioner said, ‘At the end of the day, and this is a big point to make, gamers and filmmakers do not make great people in development…and you can quote me on that. Their hearts are in the right place but a film nor a game equals development’.

Discussion

As highlighted above, the introduction of digital games as tools for international development presents a number of logistical challenges, including budget constraints and the need to design multiple language versions of a game in order to reach a broad audience. While understanding these challenges is meaningful to developing future game projects, of particular interest here are the broader tensions created by the overlap in fields. The insertion of this new technology into the development field also necessitates the introduction of new agents, who bring certain forms of capital and habitus into the development space.

The first point of interest here is the way in which media production skills and access to games create new forms of capital in the development field. Game experts bring with them resources—in the form of technological expertise, the means of production, and an understanding of game media and the industry—that allow them to create games. Within the development field, where such resources are limited, this form of capital is highly valued. As seen in this study, practitioners identified their lack of high-quality media as a challenge for engaging users and saw the inclusion of games as generating credibility and authority for their work. Thus, the games themselves present a new form of capital that puts practitioners in a stronger position with their stakeholders. However, access to the games is not the same as access to the skills and resources necessary to make the games. Thus, while practitioners benefit from the games, the game experts maintain a form of capital unavailable to development practitioners. As games are presented as an effective tool in the development space, game expertise also becomes more valuable. The valuing of this new form of capital creates tensions between development practitioners, who are generally seen as the experts in this space, and those from the gaming field.

As gaming experts, who have the knowledge and skills necessary for making games, enter into the development field, development practitioners are pressed to emphasize their background in and understanding of the development space and of the effective intervention practices within it. In doing so, development practitioners also emphasize the lack of understanding by those without this background and area of expertise. To say that ‘gamers…do not make great people in development’ is to clearly confine the expertise of agents from the games field to their specific technological skill-sets while re-determining the significance of development practitioners for defining and doing development work. Further, by continuously discussing the limitations of games and their ineffectiveness as stand-alone tools, development practitioners reassert the need for the forms of communication and behavior change expertise specific to their field, categorizing games as one possible tool that can be situated within the practitioner’s (much) broader toolbox.

And yet, practitioners who are more versed in game-based projects themselves see this experience as generating a useful understanding of new technologies and a sense of what is to come. This knowledge sets game-experienced practitioners apart from colleagues less inclined to consider technology-based projects. While a push for game and mobile-phone based projects often resulted in push-back from those in more established positions within development institutions, it gained great purchase with younger practitioners and with institutions aware of the marketing benefits game-projects can bring. This points to potential future capital gain for development practitioners able to align themselves with game-based projects.

Game experts, as newcomers to the development field, must work to establish the value of the knowledgebase and worldviews they bring. Throughout the project, game experts pointed to development practitioners’ lack of game-literacy as an obstacle to creating effective games and they questioned the validity of practitioners’ assumptions about audience values. Decisions like the one to prioritize industry standards regarding content production and timelines over working with local game producers was based on the game field insiders’ perspectives around audience expectations, even though it was at odds with development practitioners’ viewpoints. By prioritizing dominant industry standards over local industry participation, game experts reinforce the value of their individual expertise and resources while also perpetuating an industry divide between dominant and developing gaming corporations.

Game experts bring a new form of knowledge capital and habitus to the development space—the ability to understand and make games and a desire to disrupt older systems of development and social change—that is positioned against the established capital and habitus of development practitioners. This creates tensions around who has the necessary skills to effectively use games to solve development problems and who is in the way. The simple refrain of ‘they just don’t get it’, heard from agents in both fields, speaks clearly to the challenges created through the introduction of this new technology to the development space, for, as seen here, it is an introduction of much more than just games.

Conclusion

By making use of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this study analyzes the tensions and possibilities created by the overlap in fields brought about through the introduction of digital games as development tools. Through in-depth interviews with agents from the international development and serious games fields, it is clear that the framing of games as a new technology for solving development problems necessitates the negotiation of new forms of habitus and capital within the development space. This process creates new possibilities and struggles within the field around issues like who gets to make development-oriented decisions, what forms of knowledge are valued, and how development problems are solved as well as struggles around these same issues. Understanding this overlap in fields, and the tensions it brings, creates a more nuanced representation of the potentiality and problematics of producing games for development.

One limitation here is the focus on a single case-study: the games created as part of the Half the Sky Movement. While this focus allows for an in-depth examination of meaning constructed through the production of these specific games, additional research on other development game projects will add to our understanding of the overlap in fields and the opportunities and challenges created there. Just as critical scholars called for research on the use of older ICTs, more research focused on the production and use of digital games for development is necessary.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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