At this year's Montreal International Game Summit the idea of whether games should only be seen as fun was challenged in more than one session. Commentators such as industry veteran Brenda Braithwaite (designer of the Wizardry and Jagged Alliance series, among others) and Edge columnist Randy Smith in particular poured over this thorny issue.

Braithwaite's talk, named 'How I Dumped Electricity And Learned To Love Design', struck at the heart of the problems facing designers considering creating game mechanics about more than just generating pleasure. She related a story Native American photographer Zig Jackson had told her about his inability to bring himself to document a school shooting on a reservation even though he was there with his camera.

"The question he had to ask himself as an artist was 'do I take the picture or not?' The question we find ourselves asking ourselves as game developers is 'will it make money or not?'" she said.

As a result Braithwaite decided to abandon video game projects for six months and concentrate on board game design, discovering first-hand how powerful games that weren't about "fun" could be.

"One day my daughter came home from school and I asked her what she was doing at school, and she said it was Black History Month. As this forms part of her heritage I asked her what she learned about black history, and she said, 'the English went to Africa, they took a bunch of people to America and sold them to other people, until Abraham Lincoln said everyone should be free.'"

"She may only have been seven but I wanted her to understand how much more there was to it than that. So I took some of the wooden figures that I was creating game prototypes with and I asked her to create several families with them. Once she had done that I formed some boats, grabbed some of the figures at random and jammed them into the boats. While I'm doing this, my daughter was trying to put them in order with the families together, telling me I'd 'forgot some' and that they 'wanted to go together'"

"I said to her, 'Honey, no one wants to go'."

The rules of Braithwaite's off-the-cuff game were simple — it takes ten turns to cross the ocean, each boat has thirty pieces of food, every turn roll a die and use up that amount of food — but deeply affecting. "About half way through my daughter said to me 'I don't think we're going to make it'," Braithwaite revealed, "and then she asked me if this really happened. When I told her it did she started to cry, and I started to cry."

From this, Braithwaite realised that it could be possible to capture and express difficult emotions with game mechanics, brought forth by the idea that human on human tragedy such as slavery "required a system. By finding that system and making you complicit in it, you could understand it."