Independent Games - Darfur is Dying

By Juan Devis

Since 2003, the Sudanese-Government backed militia - the Janjaweed - have been systematically killing, raping and displacing non-Arab citizens for exercising their rights to free religion and speech. More than 3 million people have been affected by the crisis, in which 300,000 have died and more than 250,000 have been displaced.

The crisis in Darfur is so vast, and its tribal sectarianism so complex, that all international efforts so far have proven inadequate and inconsequential.

Within this context, it is difficult to envision a video game that would tackle the situation in Darfur in a clear, mature and concise manner. In a way, it’s a lost proposition from the get go...how can a game, ludic and playful in nature, become an adequate form of action and awareness for the crisis and genocide in Darfur?

mtvU, in partnership with The Reebok Human Rights Foundation and the International Crisis Group, went to the task and launched the Darfur Digital Activist Contest, an "unprecedented competition bringing together student technology and activism to help stop the genocide in Darfur."

The contest was awarded to a team of students from the University of Southern California - lead by Susana Ruiz - who originally proposed a multiplayer online game where users, mainly in Universities around the U.S., would embody displaced Darfurians and negotiate the survival of their camp, using tools to invite others to take action against the real genocide.

What was ultimately developed by mtvU was not the proposed multiplayer online game, but rather a single player, narrative-based simulation that comes up short from delivering what Susana Ruiz originally intended. If we measure its success, however, by the numbers it has attracted, (750,000 active hits) Darfur is Dying (the mtvU version) is a rock-star of the independent video game movement.

But what has made this game so appealing? And why has it received so much attention?

For those of you who have played The Sims or Sim City, the look of Darfur is Dying will be familiar. This was something the designers and developers - somehow hesitantly - decided to do. A bird's eye view perspective of a refugee camp with small plots of land and vegetable gardens composes the stage. Your mission, as a Darfurian, is to help your community survive by collecting water to build shelters and harvest food. As long as you have enough water, you can be healthy and help others.

The trick is that the healthier you and your camp get, the higher the threat level will be. Logic goes that the militias, knowing that your camp is prosperous, will come and take it all away. As you build your community, then, both physically (and morally), you can "send messages" (these are called "activist tools" by Susana Ruiz) to President Bush, your representative, or even friends, to make them aware of the situation in your camp (and thus Darfur) and bring the threat level down once again. I forgot to mention that when your well (or pump) runs out of water, you must forage outside the camp in search of water... and be at the mercy of the Janjaweed militias. And as with any other game... you only have three lives to spare.

Sadly, the people in Darfur only have one life, and although Darfur is Dying tries to use the networking potentials of the web as a hook to disseminate information, awareness and in some cases, rage... the representation of the conflict seems too simple and cute. I bet, though, that the almost one million people who have played the game now know something about the conflict in Darfur... the question is, what?

We are pleased to be able to include Darfur is Dying in this issue of Independent Video Games. Although clearly controversial, Susana Ruiz’s project has been able to open up a no-enter zone in the gamming industry, attempting to venture into areas that were limited, up until now, to entertainment. Could this mean then the beginning of a new game genre? Could the refinement of the processes that Ruiz began, allow us to create "documentary" games that offer alternative views on history and the world?

It is possible and somehow... necessary, because video games are here to stay.