{p4K] Reflections on Ayiti in the blogosphere
There has been a wave of recent posts reflecting and commenting on Ayiti: The Cost of Life.
Trevor Owens in his blog post New Genre: Non-Fiction Video Games, uses Global Kids' Game Ayiti: The Cost of Life to make the argument that it is time to start distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction games.
Try managing the health, education and finances of a family in Haiti. Don’t let the cartoon-y look of this one fool you, its pretty grim. There are a ton of other examples of these sort of political games, and some lively discussion of these sorts of games as journalism or as games for change.To abstract a little bit from these specific examples, the game play in each of these games hinges on real world experience; scientific data, historical documents, economic information, and develops a playable space from those experiences. History, science and politics were the first three sub-genera that came to me. What other sub-categories of non-fiction games should we be thinking about? Or am I just completely wrong headed about this?
In this post, the blogger uses Ayiti to "let Barack Obama and his family know about the exceptional power of video games to make the world a better place."
