NPR interview
Please excuse tardiness and redundancy of this entry, but decided to post it for personal archiving reasons, as I realize now that I never did.
NPR interview "Online Game Peers into Life in Darfur Refugee Camp," by Michele Norris
June 14, 2009
November 9, 2006
Persuasive Games: Games Phone Home - Darfur is Dying
Ian Bogost's write-up on "Darfur is Dying" for Serious Games Source argues some key similarities and differences with The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Ico, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and his very own Disaffected!
some excerpts:
One of the unique properties of video games is their ability to put us in someone else’s shoes. But most of the time, those shoes are bigger than our own. When we play video games, we are like children clopping around in their parent’s loafers or pumps, imagining what it would be like to see over the kitchen counter. As I argued in my last column, this trend corresponds with video games’ tendency to fulfill power fantasies. Video games let us wield deadly weapons. They let us wage intergalactic war. They let us take a shot on goal in the World Cup final. They let us build cities, and then they let us destroy them.
Darfur is Dying, created by USC graduate Susana Ruiz as part of her MFA thesis, is a game that breaks this tradition. In one part of the game, the player takes the role of a Darfuri child who ventures out of the village to a well to retrieve water for his family.
In Darfur, weakness is all the player ever gets. There is no magic to invoke, no heroic lineage to appeal to; strength adequate to survive is simply inaccessible.
I have numerous objections to the way Darfur is Dying represents the current political situation in the Sudan, most of which relate to how the game (and really, most American media rhetoric about the region) ignores the historical and political context for the current violence. But the game’s water foraging dynamic offers an important lesson for designers of serious games. If such games are meant, at least in part, to foster empathy for terrible real-world situations in which the players fortunate enough to play video games might intervene, then those games would do well to invite us to step into the smaller, more uncomfortable shoes of the downtrodden rather than the larger, more well-heeled shoes of the powerful.
Perhaps in 1982 the world was not ready for a video game about the loneliness and frailty of an extraterrestrial. But, oddly, we were ready for a film about it. E.T.’s role in the video game crash of ’83 may or may not be overemphasized, but certainly we have used its failure as part of an ongoing excuse to represent only power, and never weakness in video games. Critics might argue that frail situations are not fun. They might argue that feeble characters do not wear shoes anyone wants to wear. And that may be true. But when it comes to the world we inhabit today, isn’t it the vulnerable— like E.T., or more strongly, like the Darfuri—who demand our empathy?
Again, complete article here
September 19, 2006
1UP & Eurogamer interviews
Two blog interviews about "Darfur is Dying" are listed below - they afforded me with a great opportunity to be thorough and coherent and I am grateful to both writers/bloggers/journalists for their interest. Reading both may be a bit redundant, but each one has unique details. Should you like it, hey - you can Digg it (1UP only). That would be terrific!
August 16, 2006
mtvU to receive Academy of Television Arts & Sciences 2006 Governor's Award
mtvU to receive Academy of Television Arts & Sciences 2006 Governor's Award for its Sudan Public Service Campaign.
mtvU's Sudan campaing encompasses various projects, of which "Darfur is Dying" is a part.
"The highest honor given by the Board of Governors, the Governors Award will be presented at the 2006 Primetime Creative Arts Emmy® Awards on August 19. The show, hosted by Penn & Teller, will air as a two-hour special on Saturday, August 26, at 8 p.m. on E! Entertainment Television."
Details at the 2006 Emmy Award site .
July 23, 2006
The NYTimes on the landscape of 'games for change'
The New York Times' Clive Thompson writes an Arts & Leisure front page article today (Sunday, July 23rd) on the current field of 'games for change'. It is a broad study of the main objectives and arguments from within the field via the brief analysis of some examples currently out there. Our Darfur game project is discussed, as are: Peacemaker, A Force More Powerful, September 12th & Madrid, Food Force, Persuasive Games, USC's Annenberg School's game initiatives, gameLab's partnership with the Univeristy of Wisconsin (and their corresponding MacArthur grant), Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, and MIT's Professor Henry Jenkins.
June 28, 2006
NPR Morning Edition covers Games for Change conference & Darfur thesis
As is clearly evident, I am documenting many of the news items relating to my thesis project here in my blog. I certainly don't intend to bombard this community with the news, but I do consider it a great repository for this documentation and thus I continue... thanks all for your eyes and ears and support!
Another NPR story is here, for the show Morning Edition. It's an honor to 'inhabit' the same space as projects such as PeaceMaker and A Force More Powerful - meeting the creators at the Games for Change conference has been fantastic and inspirational. I cannot help deducing, however, that our project is quite modest in terms of scale by comparison - and you know... I am wondering if this is not part of its strength in some ways... I must admit, I have always considered the fact that there was so much I wanted to do but couldn't and didn't a flaw, a negative - but this forced simplicity and forced constraints may have lead to some unwanted, unplanned and yet very meaningful decisions.
June 27, 2006
Darfur project traffic numbers
The newest numbers for Darfur is Dying: 700,000 unique visits in seven weeks. This is difficult for me to absorb and I do wish there was access to more profound analysis in order to fully understand these numbers and the ramifications of the gameplay.
I am currently at the third annual Games for Change conference in NYC - great folks and great ideas abound. However, persistent problem for all: funding funding funding. I am honored to be participating on a panel tomorrow entitled "Mixing Gravity with Entertainment".
June 11, 2006
Associated Press on Darfur
Quite an encompassing write-up about the Darfur project is here, from the Associated Press.
May 30, 2006
Ms. Ruiz Goes to Washington
I was invited last week to meet and talk about Darfur and my project with Congressmen at Capitol Hill. It was an incredibly invaluable experience. You can see me delivering my remarks here. One write-up of the event turned up in my own local Long Beach paper of all places! [I feel compelled to note that it contains a typo in the fourth paragraph: it should read "Honored Wednesday by members of Congress..."]
As an end note, for further information please visit www.darfurthesis.net - although the website is in-progress, it does help provide important context.
May 9, 2006
Kritof's Sunday Column
From New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof’s Sunday column (May 7th). (Note: it is NYTimes Select, which (may) requires subscription, so I’ll paste the full text below).
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/opinion/07kristof.html
[I do want to say that this piece afforded me with a cathartic long cry that helped release pent-up angst, doubt and dread. While I've tried to become as informed as possible, the domain is vast and the education trickles in day by day; also - it is often the case that insight ends up unexecuted because of general lack of time, skills, etc. And so although my angst is a joke and a gross insult to even note in light of what is important, the thing is - I worried most about the project being counter-productive, my God: this would be unforgivable.]
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Heroes of Darfur
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: May 7, 2006
For three grueling years, Eric Reeves has been fighting for his life, struggling in a battle with leukemia that he may eventually lose. And in his spare time, sometimes from his hospital bed, he has emerged as an improbable leader of a citizens' army fighting to save hundreds of thousands of other lives in Darfur.
Pressure from that citizen army helped achieve a breakthrough on Friday: a tentative peace deal between the Sudanese government and the biggest Darfur rebel faction, brokered in part by U.S. officials. We should be skeptical that this agreement will really end the bloodshed — past cease-fires and promises have not been honored — but also rejoice in a glimpse of sun over the most wretched place in the world today.
If the violence does diminish — and that will take hard work in the months and years ahead — part of the credit will go to Mr. Reeves, a scholar of English literature at Smith College who has used an arsenal of e-mail messages, phone calls and Web pages to battle the Sudanese government and American indifference. He was the first person I know to describe the horrors of Darfur as genocide, and he financed his quixotic campaign by taking out a loan on his house.
Perhaps the most striking distinction in the history of genocide is not between those who murder and those who don't, but between "bystanders" who avert their eyes and "upstanders" who speak out. Professor Reeves has been a full-time upstander on Sudan since 1999, back when the people being slaughtered there were Christians in the south of the country. He noticed immediately in 2003 that Sudan had diversified into butchering Muslims in Darfur, and his frantic blowing of the whistle helped alert me and others. Visit his Web site, sudanreeves.org, but be careful — his fury may set your computer smoking.
I don't agree with every bit of Mr. Reeves's analysis, and sometimes I flinch at his stridency. But there's no better excuse for stridency than genocide.
While Darfur has been incredibly depressing, the grass-roots movement in this country to stop the genocide is immensely inspiring. (To join, go to Web sites like www.savedarfur.org or www.genocideintervention.net.) The activist kids just bowl me over: girls like Rachel Koretsky, a 13-year-old who organized a rally in Philadelphia, distributed circulars and conducted a raffle to raise money for Darfur as her bat mitzvah charity project. So far, Rachel has raised $14,000 for Darfur.
Or kids like Tacey Smith, a 12-year-old in the farm town of Gaston, Ore. After seeing the movie "Hotel Rwanda," she formed a Sudan Club with a few friends and has raised $400 for Darfur by selling eggs, washing cars and asking for donations instead of birthday presents. Her best friend's Christmas present to her was raising $50 for Darfur. Now Tacey is organizing a Darfur fair next month.
President Bush has been more active lately on Darfur, and without the administration's relentless pushing the peace deal on Friday would have been impossible. But by and large, there has been a vacuum of leadership on Darfur over the last few years, and ordinary Americans — particularly young people — have tried to fill it. I don't know whether to be sad or inspired that we can turn for moral guidance to 12-year-olds.
Then there are the entertainers. Frankly, I think it's bizarre that we turn to movie stars for guidance on international relations. But in this case, I bow low to George Clooney, who had the guts to travel to the Darfur area last month, and to Angelina Jolie, who has visited the Darfur area twice and is pushing for action on Darfur more forcefully than almost anyone in Washington.
It gets weirder: "CBS Evening News" decided that genocide wasn't newsworthy, devoting only two minutes to coverage of Darfur in all of 2005 — but there's excellent coverage on MTV's university network and in episodes of the TV show "E.R." set in Darfur. And one of the best presentations of life in Darfur is in an extraordinary video game developed with help from MTV and available free at www.darfurisdying.com. In the game, you're a Darfuri, trying to survive as Sudan's janjaweed militias hunt you down.
So that's how the response is unfolding to the first genocide of the 21st century: a video game is one of the best guides to understanding the slaughter, and our moral vacuum is filled by teenyboppers and movie stars.
Someday we will look back at this motley army of children and celebrities, presided over by a man struggling with leukemia, and thank them for salvaging our national honor.
May 5, 2006
Project website
Project website is up, bare-bones, at: www.darfurthesis.net
Kristof blogs Darfur project
From New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof's blog . I must admit, I jumped for joy when I saw his blog - fyi, it is part of NYTimes Select, which requires subscription. [First week 40,000 unique visits & 60,000 plays!]
A VERY COOL new video game has just been launched, called "Darfur is Dying." It's available at www.darfurisdying.com, and I recommend it to all.
Granted, it's a bit morbid. You play a Darfur refugee in a camp or out gathering firewood or water, and you have to outmaneuver the Janjaweed. My first two times, I was grabbed by the Janjaweed and presumably butchered. But, hey, if it'll get Americans interested in Darfur, I think it's great.
I have to confess that when I first tried to go to the site on my computer, it told me that I didn't have the right flash player installed -- I assumed that the NY Times deliberately gave me an old version of flash player so that I wouldn't while away my time playing video games. But then my kids showed me how to install it, and we've been sitting around playing it.
May 2, 2006
Gameology.org discusses Darfur project
Gameology.org writes about our Darfur project here .
In light of other "political" games recently in the news that have used their game mechanics to disseminate offensive stereotypes, it's important to think about this game and how it works to communicate its point. Fortunately, this game is refreshingly smart about its subject and effective in its delivery.
TIME mentions Darfur project
The Notebook section of TIME magazine has a brief mention of the project as well.
March 20, 2006
UC Regents Divests from Sudan
I was lucky to be at the right place (UCLA) at the right time this past Thursday and got to witness the vote from the University of California’s Board of Regents in regards to the entire UC system’s divestment from nine companies that do business with the Sudanese government.
The moment was thrilling – as the thirty or so (by my visual calculation) board members sat around in a circle and discussed the issue, the students (those that were allowed in, and only after passing through security and metal detectors) rose from their seats, held up b&w photographs of Darfurians, and in an uncompromising spirit of hope and justice, waited to hear the vote.
Although we were told, while waiting on line outside, that we were not allowed to bring in cameras, I held on to mine and I did get video of the vote - it is HD though, and I don’t have time right this moment to bring it down to something bloggable.
The vote was unanimous in favor of disinvesting! “The UC students have worked diligently to achieve this victory” and the moment when the last vote was cast was just incredible – the tears of joy impossible to hold back. The numbers were not discussed at the meeting, but the UC system invests millions of dollars internationally, so this can potentially mean a real impact both on UC's financial portfolio and on the reality of the situation in Darfur.
Information on the UC Divest Sudan student campaign here.
Work Space
saw this today in Steve Anderson's IML 101 lecture class, and it occurs to me that it eloquently presents the argument as to why it is imperative that thesis students have their own work space. (unlike the Honda commercial this one actually lasts 30 minutes and involves lots and lots of dangerous chemicals and fire, unfortunately the full video seems to be only available offline).
March 7, 2006
some more media coverage on my Darfur inspired game project:
this write-up from the Village Voice is quite amazing. it inspired some interesting discourse on blogs for a few days. while it took me a few days to absorb it, i did write a response for Mr. Dibbell and his editor. i did not submit it however - in part because it became old news, and also because quite a few of the points i wanted to make ended up in this other article from the Toronto Star.