By Sanjay Suri
LONDON, Apr 14 2005 (IPS)

You are in the cockpit of a plane circling over a drought-hit zone. Hungry thousands are waiting below. Their lives are in your hands.

You take the aircraft into a steep climb before launching your first airdrop of food aid. Now the truck that has picked up the food is struggling over a muddy and treacherous road. Between the truck – with you now at the steering wheel – and the waiting hungry, rebels loom.

You are in the midst of a virtual food aid mission. The first humanitarian video game on global hunger to be released by the Rome-based World Food Programme (WFP), ”Food Force” can be downloaded for free off the Internet and played on PC or Mac computers. Its aim is to raise awareness of food needs around the world in a language that children understand.

The game may not match the complexity of the latest that something like a Sony Playstation has to offer, but claims to be challenging enough to interest children who are avid gamers.

”The computer game world is an evolving world, with new technology all the time, but this is the first such game of this level of sophistication,” Greg Barrow from the WFP office in London told IPS. ”It has 3D moving figures, and an audio package with it. It takes players through humanitarian challenges, and gives them sophisticated tasks to do.”

Children accustomed to commercially produced games will find this game on a similar level, Barrow said.

Players get marks for the success of each mission, and can compare their scores with other players around the world.

The game launched at the International Children’s Book Fair in Bologna, Italy on Thursday is available at present in English, but other language versions are expected soon.

The WFP hopes the game will be picked up by teachers to promote food issues in the classroom. Downloadable teacher packs have been included on the game website.

”Food Force is a game that parents will encourage their children to play at home, and that teachers will find stimulating to use in the classroom,” WFP director of communications Neil Gallagher said in a statement Thursday. ”So many parents complain about the blood and gratuitous violence that kids are so frequently exposed to in video games, this is a fun and action-packed alternative.”

The WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian agency. Each year it provides food aid to an average of 90 million people, including 56 million hungry children, in more than 80 countries.

The game website offers steps beyond the game too. Real life is just a click away, and with the game players get a chance to do their bit for hungry people around the world.

The game has taken considerable time to develop, Barrow said. ”The WFP tries in many ways to explain the challenges it faces in dealing with hunger,” he said. ”The game is intended to raise awareness of hunger issues to a whole world of children fascinated by consumer games.”

The WFP will be watching the response to the game closely before it considers introducing more such games. ”We want to see how successful this is and how many children and educational institutions pick it up,” Barrow said.

”Communicating with children today means using the latest technology,” Gallagher said. ”Children in the developed world don’t know what it’s like to go to bed threatened with starvation. In an exciting and dynamic form, Food Force will generate kids’ interest and understanding about hunger, which kills more people than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.”

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