Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

I was reading a post by Barry Joseph to the new Macarthur Spotlight blog, which tracks news about crossovers between digital media and learning. The post itself is rather interesting, an attempt to distill what was learned from a kind of global summer camp held in virtual world Second Life into a list of best practices for virtual education initiatives. Definitely check it out.

But that post got me to exploring the rest of the Global Kids website, and I came across the videogame they developed in partnership with Unicef to get kids thinking about living conditions in the developing world, called Ayiti: The Cost of Life. I played the game, and soon got sucked into the challenge of making life better for my family of rural Haitians.

This is a powerful example of games for learning, and I thought it was worth a short analysis.

The game is a kind of simplified version of The Sims in which you direct a family of 2 adults and 3 children to better their lot in life by saving money and participating in educational and community building opportunities. In fact, the mechanics are closest to a genre of Japanese games little seen in the United States known as "raiser" games, where the player takes on the task of raising a young girl by scheduling her weeks full of work, education, and rest (the most well-known example in the US is Princess Maker 2). These are turn-based rather than real-time games like The Sims. In this case, the game is divided into 16 turns: 4 years of 4 seasons each. Each season you decide which of your family is going to work, go to school, work on the community center, or, in the event one of them gets sick, go to the hospital. You can also purchase items at a store that can make life easier in an appreciable way.

But if The Sims is partially designed to be an ironic commentary on suburban economic optimism, with its "residents" literally buying their way to happiness, then Ayiti is its opposite. According to the
rules the designers have set out, life is indeed hard in Haiti, and expensive. Your virtual family is often set back by hurricanes, serious diseases, and robberies. Sometimes items that you buy work as advertised, sometimes they're a waste of money. In short, this is a dire picture of Haitian life. It would be disrespectful of the real people living in these conditions to assert otherwise.

But it does create an interesting paradox: the game is very hard (and there's really no "winning" it), but also needs to testify to the efficacy of education and the community spirit. Sometimes these values come into conflict, as with the option of putting a family member to work as a Unicef volunteer. The family receives no immediate compensation for this work. The value of volunteering is expressed as a slight boost to the volunteer's education and happiness, and a long-term statistical advantage to the health and well being of the family. But those are awfully abstract when you need money to cure your family's breadwinner of diptheria. Again, this is kind of the point: volunteer work rarely benefits the volunteer directly. But a child who plays the game a couple of times may be frustrated by the difficulty level, and never get to a point in the game where she sees the value of this option. It's easy to give up on the game and conclude that the rules are stacked against you.

One detail I had a particular problem with was the representation of Unicef's presence in the community. After a family member has volunteered several times, buildings start to spring up on the map labelled with names like "community center" and "health center." The fruits of your labor. But these buildings, unlike others on the map, are grayed out. They do not offer services. If a family member gets sick, he can't travel to the "health center," but has to pay the exhorbitant rates at the hospital. I think I understand the intention behind this--NGOs shouldn't be represented as a panacea for these communities--but it's frustrating nonetheless. Game developer Ken Birdwell has said of games, "if the world ignores the player, the player won't care about the world." It's clear that, for this game to best fulfill its educational mission, it needs to be supplemented with deeper research and discussion about its subject.

But despite these points, the game certainly succeeds on many levels. The intervention I feel it makes most powerfully has the least to do with the lessons about education it attempts to impart. The game makes me care a lot, in a very short period of play, for this family. When a family member gets sick or depressed, or is depicted openly crying, it certainly tugs the heart strings. It's especially effective when I am reminded of how these little cartoons represent real families in Haiti. It is a fairly amazing feat to generate such a strong feeling of sympathy and responsibility in a short web-based game. It will be, I suspect, a valuable tool for classroom learning, as well as personal reflection.