New Funless Entertainment

Recent articles in the Washington Post and Wired describe the growth of "serious games". These software simulators are used in the public sector as a tool for education or specialized training.

Incident Commander, for example, is intended to help prepare emergency officials for the type of large-scale disaster that can result in massive loss of life. You play a "first responder" tasked with managing resources like food or first aid after events like a biological weapons attack, a school hostage situation, or a hurricane. Since these incidents are somewhat rare and real-life practice excercises are expensive, there's a real value in computer simulation.

The game isn't avaialble for public download, but the gameplay possibilities are intriguing. Can you negotiate politically-adventageous no-bid contracts in the wake of devistation? Or - if the school hostage rescue gets a little sticky - is there a counseling icon? One idea for an "expansion pack" might be an add-on game where federal and local officials compete to shift blame to each other in the national media in the wake of bureaucratic ineptitude.

But I was able to get my hands on a copy of Food Force, produced on behalf of the UN World Food Programme. I clicked around a few minutes. The scenario is based on a famine on a fictional island where global climate change caused the loss of rich farmland. Now war has broken out, and your job is to do things like airdrop nutritionally-balanced meals to refugees while over-earnest graphical characters berate you with fact-packed sermons about world hunger. Needless to say it wasn't long before I tried to drop the palettes on the refugees, which is, I am sure, what the 5th grade boys will begin doing when their humorless social studies teachers attempt to inflict this game. (Note that it cannot be done.)

There's nothing wrong with a little edutainment, of course. But preachiness and platitudes shouldn't take the place of knowledge about the poltical circumstances that are generally the cause of prolonged famine. When, for example, your releif truck encounters a roadblock of men with bulging eyes and machine guns, you can either click "Go away!" or "We're with the WFP and our fight is against hunger!" Can you guess which answer is correct?

If you really want to know the score on the real-world disaster helpfulness game, check out the situation in the earthquake zone around Pakistan and Kashmir: The UN has 9 helicopters, and very little money. But the US military has 29 Chinhooks, and is building a forward base.