>I'm told that these types of games are the next great advertising medium.

So, I downloaded the Food Force game and avidly played it. It was fun.
Even Laura - not much of a gamer herself - enjoyed dropping some bags
of food, spotting some helpless people from the air and allocating
food resources to school, health and farms.

It does become a little dull after a couple of rounds: it's a pretty
straight forward game with 6 tasks that are always identical and each
with its own fixed scenario. But this is not a game review mailing
list, so I'll try to stay focused. ;-)

The game is good. There was a Latino leading the elite team, so I
liked it even better. There was an oriental guy and a blond. In one
of the introductory pictures a black guy appears to be a member of
the team but I did not see him as a character engaged in the game
action. So racial diversity is not bad. But although the introductory
videos put emphasis on the importance of collaborating with local
organizations, they do not appear in the game and everything is done
by the elite UN team.

Now that I've played the game, I'm obliged to make some corrections
to my previous comments:

The game is a promotional initiative from United Nations World Food
Program, which is a UN agency that focuses on relief aid to desolated
areas with emergency hunger situations and crisis, and we all now
that UN does have other agencies and task forces working on the
diverse issues around sustainable development, local empowerment and
the UN's very own Millennium Goals.

So it's not entirely correct to criticize the game for focusing on
relief-aid -- which is what the WFP does --.

Also, the game's final task is a 10 year simulation where you
distribute bags of food between one of five areas to increase the
local village's "happiness" level and lead it to sustainable development.

Surprisingly enough, these 5 areas appear to be from a 1960's
development guide, completely ignoring everything we have learned
wasting billions in aid during the past decades with no significant
long term big improvement in the lives of those being helped. They are
limited to:

- School Feeding.
- Food for Training.
- Nutrition.
- Food for Work.
- HIV/AIDS prevention.

No mention of local entrepreneurship, micro and small businesses,
governance, human rights, accountability, information and
communications technologies (of course, how could I not mention it),
local non-government organizations, rule of the law, etc.

Yes, it's a simulation game I know and it's a extreme simplification
of the vision and work of humanitarian agencies, or is it?
Even war and strategy games (such as Civilization IV and Raise of
Nations -- those are the ones I play) take into account research and
innovation as key components of development.Could it be that the game
clearly depicts the simplified vision and approach and actually helps
us understand why we have been failing for decades to promote
development and are required to continuously go back and provide
emergency help here and there and there and there again?

But, overall, it's a good game and initiative... Hey, it got us
talking about humanitarian issues, didn't it? and the short videos and demos
actually explain to those playing how difficult is it to provide aid
and the many people and teams involved.

Let's hope they follow the same approach of most software and video
games and launch new versions or games in the future to cover more issues.

Cheers.

Ps: About America's Army, I'm currently downloading it, but it's a
huge download and since I'm anti-war, I will deny in the future
having played it. I'm just downloading it for research purposes...
;-) Just as I got Sid Meier's Pirates: Live the Life to document how
video games could help in the development of skills and have now
failed to blog about it but continue to dedicate over 20 hours to
playing it every weekend since Jan. 20 (Although I started as 19yr.
old rookie I'm now a 49 yr. old Adventurous pirate captain who
rescued his sister and avenged half of his family, romanced most of
the Caribbean governor's daughters and defeated 6 of the top 10
Caribbean pirates... I few more weekends and I will have discovered
the lost Incan city and defeated everyone... er, pardon me, I will
have finished my research).
Nearby Tue Feb 21 18:52:10 2006