On World Water Day on last Friday, a new mobile game called, Get Water!, was launched by Decode Global, a Montreal-based startup that specializes in mobile games for social impact.
Jordan Shapiro’s positive review in Forbes touches on a powerful aspect of the game:
Maya, the fictional main character in the game Get Water, has bigger problems. “Maya loves going to school, but she keeps getting pulled out of class to fetch clean water because the water pump is always broken! They never seem to make the boys get water though. What’s up with that?“ And right away, halfway through reading the description on the itunes download page, I realize it is not just a question of thirst and purity, but also an issue of education and gender.
These are some big human rights issues that Get Water drags out of the invisible shadows and brings into the light of discussion. I’m now having surprisingly sophisticated conversations with my two sons (five and seven years old) about the privatization and commodification of water rights while we swap devices and controllers on the living room sofa…all because of a video game.
I hope you’ll give Maya a hand and try out this free game by the folks at Decode Global, who, like our friends at Touchable Earth, won the Create UNAOC 2012 Challenge, a global competition co-organized by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, the Learning Games Network, and the MIT Education Arcade in search of mobile apps and games that can enable new avenues for intercultural dialogue.
Thanks,
Dave
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