Darfur Is Dying, Reviewed
Writing by Tim on Sunday, 16 of March , 2008 at 1:28 am
At least in my experience, it’s not a common misconception that gamers are disinterested in politics and world affairs. In my experience it’s actually pretty true. And when you want to talk about games and politics in the same breath, everyone assumes you want to prattle on about how those violent, sexual games turn kids into serial killers who want to go Doom on their high school, Grand Theft Auto on the town, and Hot Coffee on the cheerleaders. Or you get those paranoid, anti-Dungeons ‘N Dragons groups who want to ban Everquest or World of Warcraft because it will eat your children. (Personal experience alert: I had a D&D buddy in high school whose parents burned his Player’s Manual because they thought, at night, while he slept, demons jumped out of it and danced around his bed. True story!)
Games have made political statements before, such as the first Metal Gear Solid and it’s clear “Nuclear war and eugenics are bad!” message. Games such as Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, and so on have taken on historical events (or, at least, World War 2 and Middle Eastern terrorism, with varying degrees of accuracy.) Some freeware games have been taking on events that are going on right now, and not the warm fuzzy kind like American troops killing endless waves of cardboard cutout Nazis.
Darful Is Dying is a browser based game by, of all groups, MtvU. At the outset, you choose your character, which ranges from a nine-year-old boy to an elderly female. Different characters have different skills, such as the kids being good runners and chiefly gathering water, while the adults stay in the village taking care of the sick and maintain food supplies. There are two modes of play: one where you are running through the desert looking for supplies and hiding behind rocks to avoid capture, and another which is more like a dumbed-down Sim City where you maintain a camp. To my knowledge the game doesn’t actually end: you just keep playing until all of your characters are captured or you just get damn bored. It is also pockmarked with pop up screens that give the user facts about life in Darfur. Short version: it freaking sucks.
As someone who follows world affairs closely and as a clearly sane human being who honestly believes that genocide is bad, I give this game lots of props for originality and being ballsy enough to shove an injustice of such proportions down everyone’s throat from a different angle than hippie activist groups. I do have a good deal to complain about as well. For example, why the “G” rating (or I should say “E” … it is a video game after all.) Anyone who knows squat about media history knows that one of the reasons the Vietnam War became unpopular was because the Disney-loving apple-pie fed pro-church anti-gay American populace was bombarded with images of bloody, dead, mutilated American soldiers every night. I understand the game is not trying to be Doom, but the gameplay doesn’t need to match – blood and guts doesn’t need to be predicated on the player being a typical silent, faceless mass-murderer, and if it’s so concerned about the “message,” then it could honestly benefit from showing all of the blood, gore, and human cruelty real-life Darfur has to offer. Also, and this sounds downright mean, the game is flat out boring. I think the developers have based the game a little too much around getting the message across and less on being a decent form of entertainment. This is not to say that the message should be stricken completely; I fully understand that is the point. But what good is that message when the game presenting it would bore a cockroach to death? It’s like writing a book detailing all the facts of the Kennedy assassination, complete with names and places, in Klingon.
Americans are not a sympathetic people. We don’t get up off of our sixty percent obese asses because we think some cute black kid might be getting killed in a country most of our eight graders couldn’t find on a map, even if it was colored red, labeled, and superimposed and everything else was reduced and colored blue. The result from this is that a few college kids laugh at it, some neo-liberal soccer moms go, “Awwww” and nobody does A Goddamn Thing. Americans can’t be expected to do anything unless you beat them over the head with it. Ever notice how, at those very dangerous intersections where school kids cross every day, a stop light doesn’t get built until after Johnny Slappypants gets turned into a greasy slick by an SUV? The same machine is in place here. And additionally, games simply aren’t a good medium to get messages across. Remember those arcade games circa 1986 that would display “Winners Don’t Use Drugs!” every time to beat the game, or died, or while loading, or just whenever? Twenty-two years and trillions in drug war funds later, I don’t think the message quite got across.
For as cynical as I’ve been I like the idea of making a game that addresses current events. It shows that developers are not afraid to “go there” in terms of something other than illustrating true crime, realistic gore, or interactive sex. And while I fail to see the point of addressing an issue that centers around something as violent as genocide and not including the violence (it is MTV though), I believe Darfur Is Dying is slowly opening the door to a new breed of “current event” game; most assuredly a step in the right direction.
Category: Politics, Video Games
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Comment by Victoria
Made Sunday, 16 of March , 2008 at 8:31 pm
Man, this reminds me of the 10 Commandments computer game I found at the church I used to tutor at.
Like most educational games, this seems to be well-meant but ultimately ineffective because the medium is inappropriate. How can you compellingly portray genocide in a medium that’s all about stepping away from reality and joining a fantasy world? Why would a fantasy version of suffering make people care about the real thing? Yes, some of my skepticism comes from the novelty–it’s probably not worth dismissing education-oriented video games just because the medium’s mostly been about entertainment thus far.
But still, if MTV’s goal is to reach out to apathetic people with the idea that they might pay attention because it’s a video game, they’re missing the point: People are playing games because they want to play good games. They aren’t going to put down Halo for Darfur is Dying. Back when I played games, I wasn’t about to put down Harvest Moon for Math Blaster. Let’s face it: those little eggplants were pretty rocking.
