Ayiti

Ayiti: The Cost of Life was produced as part of the Online Leadership Program (OLP) at Global Kids. Players attempt to lead a family of four living in Haiti out of poverty by seeking education and employment while meeting the immediate pressures to pay for housing, food and health care to ward off disease.  Players win the game by completing their educations and finding higher paying employment.  They lose if the parents die due to poor health and the harsh conditions in which they must live and work.

"Global Kids brings programming into schools to support youth in becoming global citizens and community leaders,” explains Barry Joseph, Director of OLP. "We incorporate new media tools into that process.”   "Playing4Keeps” is one component which engages youth in a process through which they conceptualize and develop social issue games. 

"We started six years ago with funding from the Surdna Foundation to figure out if we could develop a curricula where we would work with kids and partner with a professional game development company to create social issue games,” says Joseph. "Three years ago, with funding from Microsoft Corporation, we started Playing4Keeps as a full year program with a goal of making one game a year.”

Ayitiwas developed by 20 youth from South Shore High School in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn.  Participants met twice a week for two hours per session throughout the course of the school year.   The youth selected the issues they wanted to address and the "game mechanics” they wished to use.

"We knew from the beginning we wanted youth to be involved at the higher conceptual levels,” says Joseph.  "We weren’t going to be teaching them programming or to become graphic artists.  Our program was designed to teach the youth to think critically about how one incorporates values and messages into a game concept and then how to think critically about those messages themselves.”

To handle the technical tasks, Global Kids partnered with GameLab, a professional game development company based in New York City.

Joseph knew the youth development aspect of the program model was working when one of the participants was asked if he had drawn the characters in Ayiti.  "No,” he answered.  "I am the producer.  We have gaming company and we tell them what we need and whether we like it or not.”

"That is the role we want them to see for themselves,” says Joseph.  "The goal isn’t to make them all game designers.  It is to put them out as leaders who can think critically about all sorts of projects.”

Ayiti’s impact goes far beyond the 20 youth involved in its development, however.   The game and its associated curriculum were released through UNICEF’s Child Alert: Haiti website and TakingITGlobal’s network of over 170,000 educators worldwide.  So far, it has been played over 1.5 million times.

To play Ayiti go to http://www.gamelab.com/game/ayiti.

Global Kids’ next game is scheduled to be released this month and will explore the roles played by "local heroes” in response to Hurricane Katrina.  Players must maneuver their character through the hurricane, trying to rescue their mother.  They are faced with a series of "moral decisions” about whether to rescue other people, alert the outside world to the emergency, etc.. For more information and to play the game visit www.tempestincrescentcity.org. 

ICED

ICED: I Can End Deportation was released in February by Breakthrough, a human rights organization based both in New York and India that "uses education and popular culture to promote values of dignity, equality and justice.” 

"Current immigration laws are denying due process and they are violating human rights,” says Breakthrough’s Founder and Executive Director Mallika Dutt.  "We wanted to highlight the impact of these laws by putting people into the shoes of an immigrant.  You can only do that through a game like this.”

ICED allows players to select one of five immigrant characters and guide them through a plethora of obstacles in an effort to avoid detention and deportation while ultimately reaching the goal of U.S. citizenship.   "Marc” is a 22-year-old asylum seeker from Haiti.  "Suki” is a student from Japan. "Ayesha” is a Green Card holder from India.  "Anna” is a Polish immigrant who lost her parents at the age of 13 and thinks she is a citizen.  "Javier” is an undocumented Mexican immigrant.

The characters, who are being chased by immigration officers, must make "moral decisions” and answer "myth/fact” questions about current immigration policies.  If the player chooses or answers incorrectly, he/she increases his/her chances of being thrown into detention where they endure both physical separation from their families and unjust conditions while awaiting -- often for unknown amounts of time -- the random outcome of his/her case.

ICED was developed by Breakthrough staff in collaboration with the Hunter College Integrated Media Arts program. Lead designer Heidi Boisvert has subsequently joined Breakthrough as MultiMedia Manager.

As with Ayiti, ICED was developed with the active participation of local youth.  "We partnered with teachers and students in four high schools,” says Madhuri Mohindar, a Program Coordinator with Breakthrough. The schools were Newcomers High School, The Urban Assembly Media High School, The Renaissance Charter School and Elizabeth Irwin High School.

 "We spoke with students about their world to create game maps of the way the city looked.  We talked to them about the challenges and the outcomes of the game,” explains Mohindar.  After a prototype had been developed, the same 100 students assisted with beta testing. 

One reaction from the students was that the game was too difficult.  "You couldn’t win,” says Mohindar. "So we integrated a winning strategy.  You can become a citizen if you do everything right.”

Interestingly, the Global Kids youth had a similar reaction to the beta tests of their own Ayiti game.  "Initially, all of the choices you made were to avoid bad things happening,” says Barry Joseph.  "You couldn’t make positive choices like building a community center or soccer field.”   As a result, the final version of the game is lighter in tone, albeit that the family’s parents often die from disease before too long for novice players.

Since Breakthrough launched ICED in February, it has been played by over 100,000.   The organization has used a multi-faceted distribution strategy to get the word out.  "We have been partnering with some of the larger umbrella groups including the Detention Watch Network and the Rights Working Group,” says Mohindar.  "We have had tremendous media coverage in all sorts of newspapers and television channels.”

The third strategy is online.  "The game is freely downloadable at www.icedgame.com.  We have done a tremendous amount of blog outreach. We use a lot of social networking sites.  We are on Facebook and MySpace.  We have also created a trailer for the game itself which we have distributed through all the video sharing sites.  It is on YouTube and the Hub.”

Breakthrough has also created both a curriculum and a discussion guide. 

The Cost of Gaming

Development of a digital video game is no small undertaking.  Global Kids estimates that its budget for Ayiti back in 2005 was approximately $100,000 for development alone, not counting the costs of its after-school programming.  "It would be higher now,” says Joseph.   Breakthrough puts the price for ICED at approximately $50,000 with additional costs for promotion and distribution...  

By game development standards, both of these investments would be considered "small”. Speakers at the Games for Change Festival estimated the cost of "medium” sized social issue games – such as World Without Oil -- in the $250,000-400,000 price range.  "Large” scale games, like Food Force from the United Nation’s World Food Programme, would run $500,000 to $750,000.   All of these, however, are dwarfed by the investment which goes into high-end commercial games which can run between $10 million and $100 million. 

However, you don’t need a million dollar budget or loads of technology resources to caputure the programmatic benefits of gaming.

"You can take games out there that are commercially available and begin to look at them through a different lens,” says Colleen Macklin, Director of PETLab, a public interest game design and research laboratory for interactive media created last year through a partnership between Parsons The New School of Design and Games for Change.  "Ask different questions about Grand Theft Auto. Give kids the opportunity to talk about the issues these games bring up because they do bring up issues.  Or, think about using existing games in a different way like using SimCityin a way that might emphasize issues around segregation.  You don’t need a big budget for this. You don’t need any budget.  It is just thinking about games and play in a new way.”

PETLab

PETLab, itself, is an exciting new resource for local groups interested in exploring the programmatic possibilities of gaming.

"A lot of our work relates to young people and education,” says Macklin.  "We were founded with seed funding from the MacArthur Foundation.”

PETLab is in the beginnings of a project with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.  "We are going to be designing a set of workshops in game design for young people,” says Macklin.  "The whole point is to connect kids to issues that they think are important or relevant.  We would be interested in using games to explore some of these issues but also in creating a curricula so kids can make their own games.  This builds their own skills in terms of how systems work as well as building technology skills.”

Macklin is extremely interested in doing similar work with other local groups.  "We have a Saturday program where students from local high schools come over to Parsons. We brainstorm with them and they play some of the games we have designed.  We would love to come out to local groups and work with them,  do some little game design exercises and talk about how we can think of games differently,” she says.  For information, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Fun is the Bottom Line

When all is said and done, however, do young people really want to play games that are educational and thought provoking?

"It has to be fun,” says Macklin. "You can’t fake that.”

"All the games we make aren’t designed to be an educational pill you are forced to swallow,” says Barry Joseph.  "They are out there to compete with other games.  It is one thing to preach to the converted and it is another to go out to people who are just looking to have fun and then you get them on the back end.”   He points to Global Kids’ new game on Hurricane Katrina.  "You are there playing this hard game trying to maneuver your character through the Hurricane.  But, by the time you are done, we hope the game has given you an emotional and intellectual experience you will reflect on afterwards.”

"Some of these games are incredibly popular,” says Suzanne Seggerman. "Food Forceand Darfur Dyinghave been played by millions of people.  They don’t have to be stiff, and boring.  They can be flexible and fun games about current events.  Just because kids are not reading newspapers doesn’t mean they don’t care about the issues.”

For a comprehensive list of links to social issue games go to www.gamesforchange.org.

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