Socially Conscious Gaming #3 : Food Force (PC)

http://www.food-force.com/

Food Force is a game developed by the United Nations World Food Programme, with the intention of sort of promoting what the U.N. Food Programme does on a regular basis. The game revolves around the fictional island of Shaylan, which is experiencing serious crop failures and a civil war that makes food deliveries tough. Players guide the U.N. food troopers through six missions, each of which is a simple mouse-based mini-game (think Wario Ware or Cooking Mama, but with longer games).

Though the game covers activities that workers for the Food Programme actually participate in on a regular basis as part of their jobs, they've sexied everything up a bit by adding a "paramilitary" theme and a Hollywood-esque orchestral soundtrack to the proceedings. The first mission sees your player piloting a helicopter and trying to count as many roving bands of hungry people as possible in two minutes. Next, you'll mix beans, rice, oil and sugar to get the right balance of price versus dietary needs. Then you'll airdrop pallets of food out the back of a cargo plane by stopping a sliding arrow at the right time. The game closes with a bit of a strategy twist, as you have to play an odd Tetris-like game to match offered food donations from countries to your needs. You must then decide what paths a convoy of food trucks should take to reach remote villages isolated by fighting, and finally you allocate the food resources you have delivered to build a functional village over the period of a decade (sped up, of course, so it only actually takes a few minutes).

The presentation of the game is a bit more high-budget than the usual for "serious games" (which are usually developed on a serious shoestring budget). Graphics are simple but effective, and a lot of video of actual U.N. operations is woven in. The soundtrack, as mentioned before, is surprisingly high-caliber and professional sounding. The missions even have Playstation-quality (that's the original Playstation, not PS3) videos in between where the major characters brief you on each operation in advance.

I certainly can't fault the motivations behind this one, but the gameplay, alas, falls into the same trap as most "serious games" do - it focuses too much on delivering the message and not enough on weaving it into a quality gameplay experience. Some of the mini-games are kind of fun, but all are very simple, and I'm not even sure if it is possible to fail a mission or lose. The time limits are tight enough that some of the games become a small challenge, but knowing that you are going to proceed no matter what takes any tension out of the proceedings and basically puts the game on rails. The "rail" feeling is added to by the structure - each game is followed by a fairly lengthy non-interactive exposition about the various U.N. food operations. The overall feeling is thus that of a Powerpoint presentation, albeit one where you get to click on stuff here and there.

A couple of the games could stand some tightening up, as well. The second game for example, where you try to find the right food balance to fit within your budget, essentially is just random trial-and-error for two minutes until you happen to stumble across the right formula.

All-in-all, the polish level is vastly superior to that of most socially conscious games that have so far come down the pipeline. I think the game does itself a couple of disservices though - first by not making a compelling enough game out of the concept, as covered above, and then also by setting the game in a fictional country with some goofy para-military force delivering the food. I assume that the game is aimed at young kids, but there is no reason why they couldn't have extended it to enjoyment beyond that, and anyone older than elementary school age will likely find it all rather condescending and also wonder why specific real-life situations are not being highlighted more while the game has your attention.

I think the game will work well as a gentle introduction for young children in the developed world to the issue of global hunger, specifically, kids that have no other contact with the issue whatsoever. Nicely put together as it is, it just seems too limited in all other aspects to do much for any other audience.