Ian Bogost throws down with the UN in response to their latest political / activism game Deliver The Net

Considering they’re about to hit the 2,000,000 net mark, I think we can consider the initiative as a whole a success, but it’s well worth considering the role of the game (which has only delivered ~7,000 of the total nets thus far) within the scope of this rather epic endeavour.

My questions would be thus:

• Would that number be higher or lower without the game?
• Does the game actually leave the player with any new knowledge or perspective on the African Malaria crisis?

Without actually getting into an in depth analysis, my assumption would be ‘higher’ and ‘no’ respectively.

I completely agree with Ian’s position that “There’s little sense of the lives of Africa either under normal conditions or under the suffering of malaria.” It’s essentially just a tarted up action game with posterised , malnourished Africans standing in the place of cute vector aliens.

Here’s an interesting question: Do we think that games like this keep coming out because the organisations funding them aren’t giving the developers room in the budget to actually design the things, or are they just being implemented by lazy developers who would rather get the job done so they can hurry back to their sci-fi shoot-em-up?