Games for Change

In Nanu Planet, you play a pig-like alien explorer who, in the process of crash-landing on a strange planet, gets separated from your sweetie, whom you spend the game trying to find.

The planet, like Korea, is divided into two hostile countries, with a demilitarized zone between them; you land in the DMZ. Theoretically, the game is teaching you something about the history and current state of Korea's division (the game was funded by a Korean government agency and Samsung); however, the connection to the real world is fairly notional, and it's best considered as a charming, if somewhat awkward, graphic adventure.

Family of Heroes is an interactive application (not quite a game) designed to provide information to family members of military personnel returning from deployment abroad. It was designed by Kognito Interactive, with funding from the Veterans Administration.

Initially, you're exposed to a long sequence of Flash animation with voiceover of a VA hospital therapist talking about the issues returning soldiers face, including mood swings, insomnia, behavior changes, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and providing advice on how to deal with these issues. Three fictional families are introduced, with somewhat different problems. The use of Flash animation rather than video is an interesting choice here; the only real reason for this is to ensure a consistent look with the interactive aspects of the product.

Unmanned is a boring game. This is not a criticism; it's part of the point.

In Unmanned, you play Kirk, a USAF missile operator assigned to drone duty. While the game does partly involve missile attacks on what you believe to be hostiles, the larger point of the game is the distancing that drone warfare involves; the discontinuity between its effects -- large explosions and death on the ground; and the nature of the "warriors" who control the craft, sitting in a remote structure someplace safe, staring at a screen.

Fibber is little more than a quiz; alternately, a cartoon Obama and a cartoon Romney say something they actually said, and you have to decide whether the statement is true or false. If you guess wrong, you lose one of a half dozen "articles of clothing" at screen bottom, and if they lie, and you catch them, the character loses an article of clothing. Sort of "strip gotcha."

The End is an odd beast: a combination of a platformer, a puzzle boardgame, a philosophical investigation of the nature of death, and a variant Myers Brigg map.

Funded by the UK's Channel 4 and developed by Preloaded, it was conceived as a way to engage teens and get them to think about life, death, belief, and science (I kid you not). Naturally, they created a platformer. That's the cynic speaking there; we've seen way too many "serious games" or "games for change" that take a theme and bolt it onto a game style that's totally inappropriate -- like, oh, Debt Ski. Surprisingly, however, The End works, on three different levels simultaneously.

Inside the Haiti Earthquake is an interactive web application created by PTV Productions for TVOntario as a companion piece for a documentary on the earthquake and its aftermath.

The site bills it as a "simulation," which it is not; rather, it is a branching video narrative. At start, you click to "play" as a survivor, journalist, or aid worker; you go through a sequence of video clips, most fairly short but some multiple minutes in length. Between clips, text and a series of options appear; usually there are two to three options, but sometimes you must simply click the single option.

Farm Blitz was a runner-up in the "direct impact" category at the Games for Change festival, along with Foldit, Evoke, and Participatory Chinatown (which I'd review except that it requires the Sandstorm player, and the link to it from the game is borked and Googling doesn't seem to come up with an alternative download site).

Okay, so here is the actual gameplay: Each game start, you borrow some money to buy seeds for your farm, but since the target audience of the game ("low-income adults", according to the Games for Change site) are assumed to be idiots, your debt is represented by a bunny, which you can see at screen left. Accumulated savings are represented by trees at screen right. Actual gameplay is that seeds are planted randomly in a square grid, animating into a fully grown plant quickly; by moving them into groups of three, you 'harvest' them, a match-three mechanic. But you get more for larger groups, so you want to do two by two and insert one in the middle for max returns, except that they wither after a while, so you're unlikely to get a 5-fold return. Fours are doable, though. Oh, and if you just sit there, a tornado comes through and your investment is a total loss.

People Power is a game intended mainly as a tool for teaching the basics of non-violence resistance that, like its predecessor A Force More Powerful was funded by York Zimmerman, who make documentaries, with input from Ivan Marovic, one of the founders of Otpor!, a student group that helped to overthrow Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. Game design is credited to Chris Maka, who used to work for Steve Jackson Games.

A Force More Powerful was a deep, complicated, and difficult game that was actually better for training in non-violent resistance than as a game; People Power seems to be a reaction to the problems with that game, at least inasmuch that play is straightforward and the UI simple. It still isn't great as a game qua game, but it does have some innovative features, could be useful in training, and is modestly fun, if often frustrating, to play. It ships with three scenarios (four, if you include the tutorial) plus a scenario editor that allows you to create your own.
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Europa was a Dogma 99 LARP run by the Scandinavian LARP group Weltschmerz in 2001, at a camp at Vestby, Norway, some kilometers south of Oslo. It took place in an alternate universe in which Scandinavia became something like the Balkans after the collapse of Yugoslavia -- with hyper-nationalist governments, oppression of minorities, ethnic cleansing, and outright war. The camp became a refugee center in the peaceful, prosperous, and imaginary country of Orsinia, located somewhere in the Balkans, where the players had all fled, seeking asylum.

Real Lives 2010 is an updated version of a game that has been around for several years. For those familiar with the older edition, the main differences are considerably superior graphics (including algorithmically generated 3D faces for your characters) and aspects of the game that pull in information from web sources such as Google Maps at times.