The NY Times today has an article about educational games on not-for-profit sites like Unicef and the Partnership for Food Safety. The Partnerships game is called "Stop Fluin Around". On it kids can answer questions such as "where can the flu hide" for points. The goal is to get them to wash their hands more.
The article goes on to say:
"Few would find it as compelling as video game best sellers like
Grand Theft Auto or the alien-fighting Halo 2. But thrills are not the
point. Stop Fluin' Around, which arrived in December, is one of dozens
of instructional online games that public interest organizations,
advocacy groups and government agencies say have become the best way to
reach a generation of children and teenagers weaned on video games and
the Web.
Some Web sites, like that of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, have had instructional games since the late 1990's.
But according to Kurt D. Squire, an assistant professor of educational
communication and technology at the University of Wisconsin, the use of
such games is growing exponentially as more organizations see
interactive games as a way to capture and hold the attention of people
bombarded with numerous competing messages.
"In an era where you
can't guarantee people are even watching television commercials,
getting someone to interact for 15 or 20 minutes is just huge," Mr.
Squire said."
A game from the American Cancer Society lets players flip rubber bands
at passing cigarettes (is it really necessary to use the word virtual
when describing an online game?) and one on the Greenpeace site is
like tetris but users stack hazardous waste instead of blocks.
The article quotes the Pew Study that 81% of 12 to 17 year old web users play games on a regular basis as justification for these games and the contributions and tax payer dollars that are being spent to produce them It them points out that they cost less to produce than multi-million dollar x-box games. These games attract traffic to the sites. Meager traffic,
"At its peak last October, for example, Unicef's World Heroes, which lets players help deliver supplies to children around the world, had 11,142 visitors a day - compared with 582,000 United States visitors
each day to Viacom's commercial children's site, Nick.com, as tracked by comScore."
I have nothing against these games in concept but I disagree with the idea that they are akin to filmstrips, SchoolHouse Rock, or going even further back the giant mosquito at the American Museum of Natural History that warned people about malaria.Young people play games, and the two kids the reporter asked said they might not smoke and that they would wash their hands more, and that's great. My problem with games is that the thinking behind them isn't sharp, it's one dimensional, the fun and games part might be fine but there is no thought to distribution or marketing. I wrote about in an earlier post about FEMA and their tsunami game.
Filmstrips were distributed to schools, SchoolHouse Rock played on TV on Saturday morning, and the Mosquito model dates from an age when people went to the museum it generated press and got the message out. Everyone wants to be a destination, to get people to come to their site, and that is the difference. The fact that anyone finds these games is amazing. Here we have a situation where these sites are spending either taxpayer money, and or contributions in a rough time for not-for-profits without a plan to make kids aware of their existence. The article mentions a game that DaimlerChrysler created with AAA and MADD for a $500,000. Well I bet part of that budget had to do with ad buys connected to getting the word out about the game (the rest probably had to do with the large shop that made the game for them). These organizations probably don't have those types of budgets but they could form partnerships, they could look to places to distribute their content. They could talk with Scholastic, NICK, PBS, Macromedia, and MSN.It would be better for FEMA if instead of creating multiple bad games on their site they could make a decent one and think about how to get them out. For the partners they could help play a part in educating kids and there would probably be some form of tax deduction for the contribution of bandwidth and valuable space. A win for everyone and all of the wannabee Unicef heroes in our midst.
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