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Ayiti: The Cost of Life | |||||
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During the 2005-2006 school year, Global Kids Youth Leaders in the Playing for Keeps program at South Shore High School, Brooklyn gained leadership, research, and game design skills while partnering with Gamelab to produce a socially conscious web-based game, Ayiti: The Cost of Life (CostofLife.org). The youth chose to design a game focusing on the issue of poverty as an obstacle to education and that uses the country of Haiti as a case study. In the first two years of its release, the game was played over one and a half million times. The Game In Ayiti: The Cost of Life, players are challenged to help the Guinard family struggle to make ends meet and get ahead in their poverty-stricken homeland, Haiti. In this sometimes tragic and always challenging simulation game, you help the parents, Jean and Marie, and their children, Patrick, Jacqueline, and Yves, make decisions about work, education, community building, personal purchases, and health care that might brighten their future. The biggest design challenge was creating a game that realistically and sensitively illuminated the challenges posed by poverty in daily life (specifically, in the pursuit for the global right to an education) but that was still truly enjoyable and satisfying to play. Extending this challenge, it was imperative that the game be replayable such that each session would expose to the player more of the subtleties of the relationships between the different underlying economies. The economies of the game are balanced with such guile that at first the game seems unbeatable. We assure you, though, there are ways to keep your entire family healthy and happy and educated! For Educators Global Kids developed two workshops with supporting materials for teachers and facilitators around Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Both workshops offer a number of actions for young people who want to make a difference in the real world around poverty. Curriculum: http://www.unicef.org/voy/explore/rights/explore_3170.html Discussion Forum: http://www.gamelab.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=25 |
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