Peter Packet Challenge

Featuring a Videogame, Corporate Partnership Trade-offs, and Pre-Teen Activists

Contributed by Benjamin Stokes

Last Updated: March 1, 2010

Overview

Can nonprofits spark new civic fandoms? This is a case study with an institutional emphasis, where civic content is built into a videogame, and launched by well-funded organizations. NetAid is the organization at the center – born of the United Nations in 1999 with a charge to fight extreme poverty using the Internet. This study reveals some of the practical and cultural barriers facing proactive institutions as they consider reinventing youth programs using participatory media.

NetAid’s online civic initiative was built around a custom game called Peter Packet, launched in 2004 in collaboration with technology giant Cisco Systems.

The collaboration with Cisco (depicted in the stylized image at right) provided both the funds but also stretched the civic narrative. Yet the results were noteworthy: middle school students fighting poverty in Peter Packet’s name, raising awareness and U.S. dollars. Unlike traditional learning games, the Peter Packet final scoreboard indicated real-world civic participation. After describing the evolution of the game, this case study will explore several underlying practical and ethical dilemmas. In particular, it will especially consider the limits of civic institutions, youth participants, and games as motivational bridges to civic programming.

Emergent Design

This is a story of shifting strategy, and the necessary opportunism of nonprofits. Originally, there was no nonprofit or civic voice: the Peter Packet game was first conceived to teach youth how the internet works as a technology. Any focus on civics was off the radar. Cisco began by setting aside more than $100,000 to build the game[1], with the requirement that it launch on their spring 2004 “take your kids to work” day.

This sum may seem an incredible indulgence to many civic nonprofits, especially given that Cisco’s target audience was only their employees’ children.

As a result, the Peter Packet game included three separate narratives of extreme poverty from NetAid’s field sites in India, Mexico and Haiti -- each told from the perspective of a local child. In a follow up interview with an 11-year old player, some of this content seemed to stick, from geography to basic poverty: “One of the countries I had never heard about before. I think it was Haiti. I learned that lots of kids there don’t go to school and that some of them don’t have water.” The most important shift in Peter Packet’s evolution came when NetAid suggested additional development that would embed the entire game within an online “Challenge,” and include direct civic action. NetAid utilized the original game programmers, and as a result, players who finished the initial half-hour game were shown a screen to take “real action” (at right).

They could raise funds for the NetAid projects depicted in the game’s earlier animated portion, or raise awareness about the importance of fighting extreme poverty. To extend the game world, civic actions were tracked using points: securing a donation earned five points (regardless of the amount donated), and players could earn two points when adults clicked on awareness-raising emails. This represented a deliberate effort by designers[4] to blur the worlds of civic fantasy and civic action: dollars supported the causes depicted in the game, and the interface for civic action looked like an extension of the game, avoiding the standard nonprofit practice of forcing all civic action to end up on a central website, with a single look, and an implicit mono-narrative. The unusual game-civic combination appeared to be a powerful motivating force for some: one high-achieving participant claimed that “every day after school I went to check my points and the total money for poverty.”

The Peter Packet integration of game with traditional civic infrastructure is unusual. It was only possible because NetAid programmers agreed to create a backdoor into their e-advocacy software. For example, Peter Packet could access the door to query “how many donations has child X secured?” and NetAid’s databases would provide a number for game-like display.

In the words of one 11-year old girl interviewed afterward, “I emailed pretty much my whole class which was 17, and those that did it were five or six. All of them said they liked it, and a couple said they actually joined and started doing it.” Of course, a vital goal is to maximize the throughput for this funnel, just as traditional community organizers struggle to migrate petition signers into becoming volunteers, and volunteers into leaders and organizers.

What’s unusual with Peter Packet from an organizational perspective is that the burden of first conversion falls to a videogame, rather than a human recruiter. This case study establishes that games can succeed as a motivation bridge to deeper civic action. As one 12-year old said, “If I hadn’t played the game, I probably wouldn’t go find [the Challenge] on my own.” But is the trajectory somehow qualitatively different for those who complete the process?

One important difference is the mechanism for self-reflection in civic engagement. Reflection is often considered critical for experiential learning, especially when civics is involved (e.g., in the burgeoning service learning sector). In the Peter Packet Challenge, when kids sent emails to raise awareness, the system embedded some additional text for the adult recipient.

Furthermore, U.S. privacy law prevents organizations from contacting youth under 13 directly by email without signed permission from their parents. This is a substantial burden especially at scale, and leads to frequent exclusion since email is so often the critical “trigger” for recurring engagement. The workaround for NetAid was to only ask for their parents’ email address. Instead of emailing youth with updates on their points, emails went to the parents asking them to tell their children about the points. Clearly this has substantial implications for the volume of email, the tone, etc. – but it has the side benefit of spurring dialogue between parents and youth around civic engagement. Additionally, this workaround introduces a novel social accountability for civic email spam, since youth who seek points by sending outreach email to strangers risk blacklisting their parent’s email address, or prompting irritated replies from the recipients of civic spam.

Are different youth participating civically, since the initial draw is a game, and not an existing offline social structure like a church youth group, volunteering club, or classroom activity? One of the most remarkable findings from the 2008 Pew survey on games and civics is that games are more equitably distributed to youth than many civic opportunities in schools and online (Kahne, Middaugh & Evans, 2008). The youth for Peter Packet were initially all children of Cisco employees, predominantly around the city of San Jose, California. Yet the participant pool expanded when youth began inviting their friends to play. This distribution pattern is unusual for civic organizations, especially for youth, and may spur unusual “enclave deliberation” (as discussed by Sunstein, 2000) – for both good and ill. For example, do games attract an enclave of “players” who expect real-life civic challenges to be as solvable as those in games?

Despite the success and innovations of the 10-day pilot, NetAid decided it needed to develop a new game, rather than to invest in supporting or modifying Peter Packet.[5] This decision is telling. In large part, NetAid executives felt that their anti-poverty goals were obscured by the game’s content on how the Internet works.

This is a valid point, but it also represents a profound ambivalence in the nonprofit sector around the purity of branding