The world has always been enthralled by games. Some of our largest, most expensive
structures have been built for the joy of the game: the Olympic stadium in
Greece, the colosseum in Rome, hippodromes, soccer stadiums, football stadiums,
and every two to four years, another Olympic stadium/park. We have television shows that command our daytime
with games and there’s a lot of money to be won on those shows. Even TV shows such as The Blacklist, White Collar,
House of Cards and the like are about games played over decades, cultures,
governments. Even in our scholarly
fields, games are at play. To win, you
must get an A, the highest score available to each player. Economics is another playing field, where
each partisan tries to make the most money off of someone else. Then there’s the lottery. We could talk for days about the different
ways games have hijacked our society.
But perhaps, there is a positive way that games shape us. How? By
using that format to tell us a story we might not encounter ourselves. Playing only our story could be dangerous, as
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie alluded in her TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story”.
But if we can step into someone else’s
shoes and walk or ‘play’ a mile, we can understand where they are coming from
and combat the issues together.
Malnutrition and Poverty (MAP), the Twine game that I
created, is one such experience. MAP
takes you through a speed-date as a single parent, with a limited and low
income, with responsibilities and obligations that must be met, and no help to
reach for. This is a situation found in
many parts of the USA. There is an
epidemic known as obese malnutrition.
That sounds like an oxymoron, but there is no truer utterance of the
condition. The reason that people are
becoming both obese and malnourished is because the types of foods that are
low-cost are also high-calorie, highly refined and loaded with carbs, sugar,
salt, saturated and trans fats, etc.
Foods such as vegetables, fruits, meat are all highly priced.
How do you feed a family of four when you have $250 a
month? It might seem like a lot of
money, but spread over 4 weeks and 3 meals a day, it comes down to about $2.25
per person, per meal. So, what do you
buy with $10 that is sufficient to meet your family’s caloric needs? Not the
bag of oranges for $5. Not the broccoli
that is $1/pound. You buy the pasta mix
for $2 each that will fill your kids’ stomachs.
In this game, there are very limited choices, but that is
not so different from the everyday life of some Americans. This is there story. German novelist Juli Zeh said that “what
people call there daily choices are really just a well-thought-out game.” And
in the game of nutrition, having a low income is the worst handicap a player
could have.
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