In an attempt to increase awareness of their World Food Programme, the United Nations has released a video game called Food Force. The game looks interesting, a kind of sim-based strategy game with different kinds of missions to convey the difficult realities of fighting world hunger. This being the UN, we've got a nice mix of ethnicities, lots of micromanaging, and dealing with angry locals intent on harming you. It's a nonviolent game, apparently, and of course you're too busy trying to feed people to ever mow them down.

It's hard to object to a game like this - not only is its heart true, but the education seems well-integrated to the liminal challenges of gaming. It could be a far more simplistic, didactic game than what I'm seeing on the surface, there's actual thought made into treating games as a serious pastime.

I won't be downloading this game anytime soon. If it was a game about the oil-for-food scandal, that'd be a different story. But for now, I'm going to stick with being an agent of Third Echelon in Splinter Cell. (Midway through Pandora Tomorrow, thanks for asking.) We all have our reasons for wanting to play video games and one of my motives is to be a sneaky, manipulative bastard.

Feeding the poor just isn't on my gaming agenda.

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