Gaming Your Way to the NWO

Yes, mouseketeers, it's a new save-the-world online game! Get you decoder ring and help save the world. I know, let's start in Africa...

EVOKE trailer (a new online game) from Alchemy on Vimeo.

"Evoke," the $500,000 new investment from.....(wait for it...)

Yes, the World Bank!

And in very seductive anime cartoon panels, pulsing world beats and that ever-present deep, gargley Central African voice (reminds me of Geoffrey Holder in the UnCola commercials), all to get "young people" involved in solving our crises in a  "10-week crash course in changing the world"

The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.(emphasis mine.)

While it is directed at (South) African youth primarily, and the first "challenge" is to , well, they are not too clear on that. The player must wade through endless RSS files and blogs of African "problems." I followed one string that led to a BBC page that claimed the answer lay in a "free trade zone" for Africa (curiously omitting Somalia.)

Congratulations. You're off to a good start. You found your first EVOKE -- and you answered it. Most people won't come as far as you already have.

Now you must go further. You're ready for your first mission. You're ready to become a social innovator.

WHO WE ARE

Social innovators invent creative solutions to the world's biggest problems.

We don't wait for someone else to change the world. We do it ourselves.

They (the players) are after "economic opportunity, happiness, human rights, etc." I wanted to post the US Constitution and then tell them to eliminate the dictators that are ruining the continent. Critics in this Fox piece claim the obvious, that most (at least 50%) have NO access to the internet. One Herb London of the Hudson Institute suggested the half a million be used to fund internet access for the needy.

Oh, great. Just what we need, more emails from Nigerian princesses.

On the face of it, the game seems like a great way to engage kids in problem solving and deductive reasoning and some US social studies teachers will jump on this with both feet. But it has all the appearances of a subtle game changer, using the assumption that democratic capitalism cannot possibly work...that and:

The common root cause of economic decay, state collapse, ethnic violence, civil war, and humanitarian disaster in Africa is bad, abusive governance. Because most states lack any semblance of a rule of law and norms of accountability that bind the conduct of those in government, their societies have fallen prey to massive corruption, nepotism, and the personal whims of a tiny ruling elite. (The Hoover Institute)

I'll stay in the WII for now. At least it talks to me...and misses me when I'm gone.