March 5, 2007
Hoping to educate children on ways to mitigate the effects of natural disaster, The United Nations has released a Stop Disasters!, a free, online game.A press release from the U.N.'s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) describes the game and its purpose:
Children are one of the most vulnerable groups when disasters occur. If we teach them from the early age about the risks posed by natural hazards, children will have a better chance to save their lives during disasters.
...Children will learn playing how the location and the construction materials of houses can make a difference when disasters strike and how early warning systems, evacuation plans and education can save lives...
Gamasutra reports British developer Playerthree designed the game, which addresses events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and wildfires. Although Stop Disasters! is only available online and in English at this time, the U.N. plans to eventually create a DVD in multiple languages for children in Africa, Asia, Latin America and thw Caribbean.
Comments
It does not just cover edutainment.
It occurs to me that the term "serious game" is little more than a replacement for the largely outdated term "edutainment." Although the latter term carries some stigma -- blame a lot of really terrible kids' games for that -- I think it is a more accurate description of what people are trying to do with the genre. After all, despite (and in some cases because of) the educational value, a game like this is still meant to be fun. The key thing is to remember that a game's entertainment value does not lessen the seriousness of its message. If anything, it has the opposite effect, because a member of the target audience is more likely to spend more time with a game that he enjoys. An educational but boring game will be discarded and forgotten within minutes, but a true "edutainment" title will be fun enough to capture a player's attention and make him think.
Useless. '
Which is different from every other governing force on the planet how exactly?
"How much leeway is there for disaster CAUSING? Okay, peasants, you get to live in a house of straw on the river! Yay!"
You can do that too. Bulldoze all the buildings on high-ground, build cheap ones in the flood plain. Not nice, and gives you a bad score, but doable.
Okay, peasants, you get to live in a house of straw on the river! Yay!
If you like games like SimCity, it's definitely fun. I've been playing all weekend trying to go for 0 deaths in the flooding scenario.
And at the same time, it's very educational, because you learn a lot about disaster prevention from the upgrades and other things you can build. Stuff as simple as capping wells so they don't get contaminated by runoff, or recognizing that secondary flash floods can cause water to assault a town from a direction you may not have initially considered. Or even just that backflow valves can save you thousands in damages.
Useless.
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