There were two browser windows open on my computer: one containing a simple online game and the other a news page. For a few seconds, I got them confused — a rare event here in the escapist world of video games — and a very strange thought surfaced: Was the tsunami that hit the Solomon Islands real or was this breaking news story somehow part of the game?
After all, I had just clicked a button to engulf an animated island, complete with tiny animated people, with a digital tsunami. I was playing Stop Disasters, a free Web game recently released by a United Nations agency, and I had spent 20 minutes and $50,000 in fake funds preparing the island — reinforcing houses, building schools and sand dunes, and educating the populace about evacuation plans. Despite my efforts, or perhaps because of them, there were 16 virtual people seriously injured and 16 killed. I was given a respectable score and the opportunity to help other communities prepare for floods, wild fires and earthquakes.
I gave my head a good shake and then started reading through stories about the real tsunami — and it amazed me how much I had learned in that 20 minutes of play time. The two windows were filled with many of the same terms and issues.
Stop Disasters was put together by an organization called the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and the studio Playerthree, and anyone with a computer hooked up to the Internet can play it within two minutes of finding the website (stopdisastersgame.org„©). It is part of rapidly growing interactive category called serious games: activities that deliver information along with entertainment.
This one is a simplified strategy game, or god game, wherein the player looks down upon his or her charges and alters everything with the touch of a cursor. What you quickly find out here is that there is no way to win. The money runs out before you can make all the necessary preparations and when the disaster comes — and it always does, despite the name of the game — the best you can hope to do is minimize its impact.
This format and its scoring system encourage you to try again and each time you learn a little more about disaster reduction — I personally gained a lot of respect for trees, especially the ones bordering beaches.
One thing you can't do in Stop Disasters is reach down and move the little people to a safer place, like Saskatoon. For humanitarian play with more humans and less infrastructure, I highly recommend Ayiti: The Cost of Life. This Web game was made by Brooklyn high-school students in the Playing 4 Keeps new-media program. They teamed up with the developers at Gamelab to create a simple but touching strategy experience about life in Haiti. (Unicef, the game's host, has buried it on one of its youth-oriented sites, but Web searches for Ayiti, which is Creole for Haiti, will put it near the top of the list.)
The player controls the lives of the Guinard family, two parents and three kids, for four years. At the beginning of each season, you can send the individual members to school, work or the nearby hospital. I started by sending the three kids to a medium-priced school, the father to work at a rum distillery — it had unsafe conditions, but it paid better than staying on the family farm — and the mother to a job in the market. Within two seasons, the family was in debt, the father was sick and I had to pull the kids out of school to help out.
I quit and tried again. No school this time, but I bought books the whole family could use and set the kids to work on the farm. This time, all five Guinards were sick in a year, and the youngest died of cholera in just over two years. It sounds depressing, this learning through horrible failures, but it does get its message across, especially for school-aged kids who have never had to make hard choices to balance the family budget. Very quickly, you have to start imagining what it means to live in poverty.
That is one thing games, even seemingly simple ones played in Web browsers, do very well: They put you in other people's shoes. It may be difficult or even impossible to win in Stop Disasters and Ayiti, but both games are winners.
scolbourne@globeandmail.com
