Good timing, Ian.

In recent weeks soft drink makers and even fast food giant McDonalds have tried to shift the blame for childhood obesity from their own high calorie products to video games.  Today, Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games is set to release Fatworld, a new political game which examines that very issue. Of the project, Bogost writes:

Fatworld is a videogame about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S...

The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations.”

In Fatworld, players create a character and run a restaurant in a perpetual virtual world.  What you eat, how active you are, and how you run your business all have an effect on you and your town’s health.

By choosing your character’s dietary and exercise habits, you can experiment with the constraints of nutrition and economics as they affect your character's general health. Will it be wheatgrass and soy? Or fried chicken at every meal?

How much can you afford to spend on food, and how does that affect your general health? Characters who eat poorly will get fat. Characters who don’t exercise will move around the world more laboriously. Disease and death will eventually ravage players with poor health, while those with good health will live to a ripe age.

Enterprising players can also influence public policy and merchandizing guidelines in Fatworld in an attempt to discourage the consumption of fatty foods.  You can even force the town down the vegan path by banning meat.

User-created content such as recipes and meal plans can be shared with other players online.

Fatworld is published by ITVS Interactive, and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Via: Water Cooler Games

-Reporting from San Diego, GP Correspondent Andrew Eisen wrote this story while eating a well-balanced lunch