Sneak Peek: Duke Anti-nuke

My 7-year-young son is up with the birds, and his Dad, this morn­ing. He’s at the PC next to me, googling Poke­mon and end­less­ly ask­ing when I’ll be done so I can tell him a Poke­mon sto­ry. (Which is actu­al­ly a call-and-respon­se kind of nar­ra­tive in which I lay down a basic sto­ry­line and he fills in the Poke­mon char­ac­ters and what they do, as I’m clue­less about the intri­ca­cies of Chowazar train­ing issues.)

Which brings me to games and activism.

Any aging dig­er­ati out there remem­ber the first Whole Earth Soft­ware Cat­a­logue (1984)? I think I’ve still got mine kick­ing around in the base­ment some­where. It was the dead-tree Tucows of its day, list­ing cool stuff you could buy on 5 and a quar­ter inch flop­py disks to run on your (in my case) 286 Com­paq Sewing Machine portable with 10 megabyte hard disk mon­ster rig.

Chap­ter One was games.

Stew­art Brand made a com­pelling case for why, at a time when the PC was infest­ing account­ing depart­ments all over the plan­et and becom­ing some­thing that every office had to have, he chose to lead with fun, say­ing that games are the way we first learn as chil­dren, and play­time learn­ing remains one of the best ways to mas­ter a com­pli­cat­ed new task like DOS-based Per­son­al Com­put­ing. And indeed, the ear­ly adopters I knew in the days of the Kaypro II, where I cut my teeth, all had a child-like streak of curi­ousi­ty and gee-whizzik­ers-ness.

I’m remind­ed of that every time I look at the stats over at the Green­peace web­site and see that among the many fine 50-page stud­ies and painstak­ing­ly researched infor­ma­tion, it’s still the Games sec­tion which rules the mousepa­ths. Which has been dri­ving some thought about how we can bundle cam­paign mes­sag­ing into fun-filled deliv­ery pack­ages. Top on my list: How to inform kids today that all that stuff about how the nuclear weapons threat is not sim­ply a mat­ter of rogue states or a bygone of the Rea­gan era, and that thing called Cher­nobyl and what it was all about.

So I’m hap­py to provide you with a sneak peak of our lat­est Pain­less Activism Edu­ca­tion Device: Duke Anti-Nuke.

We bun­dled a hun­dred Fun and Fear­some Facts about nuclear weapons and nuclear pow­er into a plat­form game fea­tur­ing our hero, Duke, as he strives to con­vert nuclear pow­er plants into wind­mills and solar farms and dis­arm those pesky WMDs before the evil ter­ror­ists get to them. The facts about all things nuclear have been shred­ded by a smarmy Nuclear Indus­try pub­li­cist, and it’s Duke’s job to gath­er them up.

Rich Salter and Denise Wilton put this togeth­er. I’m real­ly lame at plat­form games, so in order to test some of the high­er lev­els and see the win screens, I need­ed some­body who could actu­al­ly get past that nasty place in screen three where the radioac­tive waste starts leak­ing and you have to dodge guards, falls, AND radioac­tive drops.

So I sat my son down, (he could mouse around by the time he was 3) and we went head to head on our two pcs in the base­ment in a week­end-long Duke chal­lenge. I haven’t had so much damn fun in ages.

But while at 7 years old Doon could appre­ci­ate the game­play, he cer­tain­ly missed the mes­sage. The son of a peace activist had one improve­ment sug­ges­tion: Duke should have a gun, so he can shoot the guards.

We didn’t imple­ment that par­tic­u­lar change request.

What’s *your* favourite game with a mes­sage?