The situation in Sheylan is desperate. Without immediate assistance from the United Nations, the droughts and environmental degradation in this tiny, war-torn island nation are going to claim the lives of almost all of its inhabitants. Your assistance is desperately needed. In fact, the World Food Programme wants you on the island overseeing their entire operation.
There’s no need to bust out your atlases, bewildered SFSers; Sheylan is not real. However, it really is the site of a major food shortage in the UN World Food Programme’s six-month-old computer game, Food Force, designed to promote awareness of the WFP’s mission. The UN’s creation is just one of a number of current projects to create video games that mimic real-world scenarios and advocate the use of humanitarian and diplomatic-rather than brute-force. But as virtual reality becomes virtually real, it increasingly becomes actually ridiculous.
Achieving world peace in a video game used to mean a kid sitting in front of a TV stomping on a bunch of goombas and saving the princess from a turtle-like tyrant. Since those simple days, that kid has turned into enough people to make video games a multi-billion-dollar industry. This means video games are a solid target for groups like WFP.
Currently underway at Carnegie Mellon University is an effort to create a game where players negotiate peace between Israel and Palestine. As the leader of either the Israelis or the Palestinians, gamers will have to plot a course that avoids too much aggression?-plunging the region into violence-and too much concession-making themselves targets for assassination.
Naturally, the game is won by applying the tried-and-true methods that have brokered peace in the Middle East thus far. The international diplomatic community continues to struggle with the problem, but a few clicks by a pizza-faced middle schooler will bring about a happy ending?
That is the tragic downfall of the video game: there is nothing to be learned when a situation too complex for the world’s greatest thinkers is parodied so it can be solved with a joystick.
Of course, some may agree with global humanitarian heavyweight MTV, which believes raising awareness is the keystone of these educational games. To that end, the same company that pays Andy Milonakis to drink ketchup has started a contest to create a video game that fights genocide in Darfur. Finally, people will be able to learn about a tragedy that has been occurring for over two years without having to leave their computer! It’s too bad there are no other ways to keep abreast of ever-changing worldwide events that we could suggest to our impressionable youth. But then why pay attention to the real problem and do whatever you can to help when you can be the hero in its oversimplified virtual equivalent?
Still, Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at the University of Indiana, is optimistic that games can help social problems by showing the power of peaceful institutions.
“It would just have one feature,” he told The Washington Post about the perfect game. “Live democracy … Games give you the opportunity to live a culture, and I think that is dramatically more powerful and persuasive than a million leaflets or 60,000 Peace Corps volunteers.”
And I’m sure I could find millions of Africans and South Americans who agree. Castronova’s ideas may be novel, though. If we could program a video game with such a perfect world, it would be preferable to remain enraptured in it 24/7. We could hook our bodies up with a series of feeding tubes so we never had to leave, and, with a little research, be able to project the game directly into our brains so we never had to know the difference. To save space, we could even encapsulate ourselves in little red bubbles and have machines do routine maintenance on the fields of people living in utopia. I get a strange feeling that some guy in a trench coat would ruin it for everyone, though.
There is a serious lesson to be learned from “serious” gaming: If we cease to believe that kids can understand real-world problems on real-world terms, there is virtually no hope they will ever understand them at all.
