Food Force, and communicating science

Check out the United Nation World Food Programme's educational video game, Food Force. You're the forth member of a crack WFP team put together to deliver food aid to a fictional country that is having a hunger crises. I've only taken a quick look at the game myself, but it has lots of interesting cinematics, music, and game play. The idea is that by playing you learn about a hunger crises, and how the UN tackles it. And having fun. And spending an afternoon not making progress on your thesis. Not.

Making a video game that teaches about climate change came up in our brainstorming sessions last year, and this is an interesting case to study.

But more importantly for me, I found the link to this game in the comments of this RealClimate.org post on communicating science (both comments and post are worth reading), which itself was linked to by today's post on the same topic. This is the space I'm playing in: communicating science. I started with the ill-defined idea of visually querying climate data/models as a way to communicate the science of climate change and, lo', here's a whole area of work to distract me from narrowing down ground and motivate a specific thesis idea.