Video Games Play Budding Role in Touting Charity Work

DISPATCHES

By Ian Wilhelm

Stacey Peña leads a truck convoy filled with rice and beans through a white desert, hoping the rough terrain doesn’t puncture a tire. She scouts ahead for broken bridges and land mines as she tries to reach a refugee camp filled with starving people who have fled their villages because of drought and civil war.

With its endemic poverty and violence, Sheylan — the country Ms. Peña is helping — seems like hell on earth. Lucky for the world, though, Sheylan isn’t real. The faux Indian Ocean island exists only in a computer game called Food Force. And Stacey Peña? She’s a quiet 11-year-old girl from Washington Heights, N.Y., with a soft smile and quick hands on the keyboard.

The United Nations World Food Programme created Food Force to teach Ms. Peña and other kids ages 8 to 13 about the group’s mission to fight global hunger. Through six levels, players search for Sheylanese refugees, drop food from a C-130 Hercules airplane, and even negotiate with gun-toting rebels with the assistance of an Angelina Jolie look-alike.

While the video-game industry is well known for ultraviolent shoot’em-ups like Grand Theft Auto and Halo, a small number of software developers and nonprofit groups are part of the so-called serious gaming movement, which develops interactive games to educate players about social or political causes.

These efforts are still young, but heavy-hitter grant makers, such as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago, are supporting them. There’s even a push to establish a quasi-federal agency akin to the Public Broadcasting Service that would support serious gaming.

Food Force, which was released last year, is considered a trailblazer of the genre and has inspired other games, such as Darfur Is Dying, which allows people to play a virtual refugee in that deadly region of Sudan.

The Rome-based World Food Programme says that for a relatively cheap price at $350,000, the game has been a marketing bonanza. More than four million people worldwide have downloaded the game from the Internet — it is available free at http://food-force.com — and a version of the game for grown-ups is in the works, the group says.

Yet how effective is the game as an educational tool? Are kids more inclined to support antihunger efforts or other charitable causes after playing Food Force?

The U.N. group says it doesn’t expect the game to turn a child into a saint, but it does say Food Force players are more likely to understand global hunger and perhaps push world leaders to do more about the problem. The humanitarian organization says it has received $3 checks or other small amounts from children who have played the game.

In Ms. Peña’s case, Food Force seems to have produced mixed results.

On a recent Friday morning, Ms. Peña sits down in front of a Dell computer at her elementary school to play Food Force. She ties her long, black hair back in a ponytail to keep it out of her eyes.

Ms. Peña, who says she wants to be a lawyer or a detective when she grows up because her favorite TV show is Law & Order, began playing Food Force at school. Then, after a New York nonprofit group last October gave her and every other sixth grader at the Patria Mirabal School a computer with Food Force already installed, she started playing at home. She says she plays the game a few times a week.

As the game begins, a U.N. official cloaked in shadow describes the Sheylan crisis in a grave voice reminiscent of a Mission: Impossible intro. “The region was once green and plentiful. But the world’s global-climate changes have badly affected Sheylan,” he says. He adds that the environmental disaster has exacerbated the island’s civil conflict.

On the first level, Ms. Peña guides a U.N. helicopter to spot crowds of starving people.

“People will start moving out of the country and then there’ll be no people there and people will start dying,” she says matter- of-factly.

Her silver bracelets jingle on her wrist as she quickly moves the mouse around, but she seems distracted. While Food Force has slick graphics with a dramatic drum-and-bass soundtrack and video footage of actual famines in poor nations, it is a bit repetitive.

As the game progresses, though, Ms. Peña gets more animated.

During her favorite level, she is required to calculate how much beans, rice, sugar, salt, and vegetable oil to put in food packages to maximize their nutritional value without going over budget. The task can be challenging even to adults, but given that Ms. Peña’s favorite subject at school is math, she finishes the level with time to spare.

Most apropos to philanthropy, the game teaches that not all contributions are helpful. In one scenario, Ms. Peña must seek food from donor nations, but she must decide whether the countries’ offers will reach Sheylan in time or provide the assistance that is really needed.

“That’s a real generous donation by that government, but does it fit with your supply needs?” cautions Miles, an animated World Food Programme official who advises Ms. Peña on this mission.

On the next level, Ms. Peña says the game seems naïve.

While she’s leading the truck convoy to get to refugees, she is stopped by armed rebels who demand she turn over the cargo. After a brief conversation, the militants allow the relief workers to continue on their way.

“I told them that I’m with the WFP and convinced them not to steal the food,” Ms. Peña says. “They always agree, but I don’t think in real life it would happen like that. They probably would take the food no matter what.”

Ms. Peña’s skepticism about this part of the game comes from life experience; she says on her walk to school she has to avoid “people with guns and drug addicts” who most likely would not be as forgiving as the virtual bad guys.

Julie Shannon, a public-school art teacher who introduced Ms. Peña to Food Force, says she has tried to teach her students that the game relates to real life. Says Ms. Shannon: “I like games that allow kids to role-play on a human level as opposed to a gangster level.”

She uses educational materials from the World Food Programme to help make that point. On her classroom door, for example, she has a map of the world showing the percentage of hungry people in each nation. She says that many of the students from the Dominican Republic, like Ms. Peña, were surprised to learn that at least 20 percent of the population there is undernourished.

Aside from the game being an educational tool for kids, the World Food Programme hopes that Food Force will influence adults, with parents perhaps playing the game alongside their children. Ms. Peña says she showed Food Force to her mother and father, but they were confused about how to play it. “They were kind of lost,” she says.

Perhaps the most challenging level, at least ethically, is one in which Ms. Peña must decide how to divide food among Sheylan villagers, including HIV/AIDS patients, students, and workers building roads and houses.

“First, I would mostly give it to the schools because that means more people could go to school,” Ms. Peña explains. If the children get educated, she says, they can get out of poverty.

After that mission, the game ends, and Ms. Peña earns a score of 42 million points. To prompt players to improve their Food Force skills, the game’s Web site allows them to post their scores, with the current high score being 56 million. In addition, the American branch of the World Food Programme held a Food Force competition this year, with the winner receiving tickets to Super Bowl XL.

But while Ms. Peña receives millions of points, it remains unclear what exactly she has gained.

Clearly she knows more about global hunger than she did before playing the game. But how effective a teacher a video game can be remains questionable. For example, Ms. Peña doesn’t watch the lessons about the World Food Programme that are interspersed between missions; she says she saw them the first time she played and now finds them boring.

Ms. Peña does say she has a growing interest in volunteering in Africa, perhaps in part fueled by Food Force. She does not want to be one of the “people who mostly care about their money and how they want things to work out for them,” she says. “They’re just selfish.”

She would like to volunteer, she says, “not only because of the game, but because I just like to help other people.”