New Online Game Covers Issues, Not Alien Warfare
TROPICAL AMERICA: an online game about the histories of Latin America
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This is interesting. Check it out. Click here to visit the Tropical America site. And here is the news announcement for the game/site. |
Take a sledgehammer to the logic of linear time. OnRamp Arts' 'Tropical America' invites you to weave through 500 years of Latin American history, collecting sugar cane and speaking to the gods along the way. Save lives instead of ending them. Follow a narrative that is not only intriguing, but soaked in history. A video game disguised as a puppet show, a woodcut for the Flash generation. Best of all become a Hero of the Americas, and help create a memorial to those whose history has been forgotten.
Developed in collaboration with teachers, artists and Los Angeles high school students, most from new immigrant families, Tropical America explores the causes and effects of the erasure of history in vivid and compelling ways. Entitled in tribute to the Los Angeles mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros, whitewashed in 1932 due to its controversial content.
The story of Rufina Amaya, sole survivor of the 1981 massacre in El Mozote in El Salvador, provides the contextual anchor and the impetus from which Tropical America begins. The player’s challenge is to discover four pieces of evidence that will bring justice to the memory of the murdered villagers. As a thematic interactive video game, Tropical America features four inter-related, cross-cultural episodes culled from 500 years of Latin American history.
Each episode functions as a story within a story, revealing the profound connections between seemingly disparate events. What do the myth of El Dorado, the battles of Bolivar, the single-crop economy of Cuba, or the poems of Sor Juana de la Cruz have in common? And how did each of these contribute to a tragic December day hundreds of years later?
Bearing witness, Tropical America reveals a forgotten terrain, the birthplace of contemporary cross-cultural life.
What other topics or issues could be well treated by a game like this? Tell your views to The Progress Report:
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