Meet the games that lay the foundation for a new genre of movement building.

One of the most obvious ways to Inspire Collective Action is to make games about movement-building. So where do we stand with that?

Suikoden is essentially a game about building a movement, made up of 108 distinct heroes. Final Fantasy VI does something similar with its 14 characters and ambiguous/rotating protagonisthood.

In Mass Effect 3, much of the ending depends not on the heroics of an individual or even party group, but how well the player has been able to build and support an intergalactic coalition of alien civilizations, often with conflicting goals and ideals.

More recently, Watch Dogs Legion was another interesting experiment in movement-building gameplay, but there is much more to be explored here and the theories of action for climate activist movements like Sunrise Movement or Extinction Rebellion could form fascinating gameplay systems, while offering players a tantalizing sense that if enough of us work together, things really can change.