Village the Game: Play it. Love it. Live it.

Earlier this year, Village the Game became a semifinalist in the Echoing Green competition for seed capital and a network of mentors. While I'm disappointed that Village did not make it to the final round of competition, I'm really impressed with the quality of initiatives that won. I did not expect to be competing with Harvard MBA graduates and their start-ups.

I'm posting below the feedback from the Echoing Green judges. One thing I learned from their feedback is that conveying the merit of social change through a video game is quite a challenge with a mere business plan a couple spreadsheets. Their feedback reinforces my assumption that Village probably won't get major sources of external funding until I get some playable prototypes out the door using my own resources.
- Darian

Echoing Green 2008 Evaluation Notes

Very original idea. Likely to succeed.

While I love the concept of the game, I think the challenges of developing an exciting and playable game are considerable. The WFP Foodforce game proved it could be done, but without significant upfront development budget, I think it's simply too high risk. It seems that this strategy might be an excellent fit for a large international development NGO, but I don't see how it can go-to-market independently.

Using entertainment to create awareness and teach about social problems has been effective in most forms of media. Computer games are becoming a mass medium, taking audience--especially the younger audience--away from TV and film, the traditional means of broadcasting calls for change. So using computer games to promote pro-social games is a necessary innovation. Computer games have become high production cost ventures, however, and consumer adoption has proved difficult to predict: they are a hits-based business. There is a significant risk that an upfront investment in a computer game will never be recouped. But a slightly revised market approach--producing a series of less complicated and cheaper to produce games--might lower the risk enough for this to be a viable investment.

Mr. Hickman has the right skills and experience to lead and develop this organization. My main concern is his theory of change. I am not sure that playing a simulation game will really energize people who are not already interested in international development. However, I really like the creativity of this idea and think it is worth a shot.

Strengths

- Darian clearly has passion for his project and is committed to helping the economically disadvantaged. I searched online for his name and found a blog and website which provides additional support for his commitment to seeing through his project



Weaknesses

- Viral gaming such as he is proposing is a very difficult and competitive field. It is extremely hard to gain the kind of critical mass Darian would need for this to be both economically feasible and to actually produce meaningful social change

- Darian may not have a good grasp on the startup costs involved in creating a gaming company. He has projected $700K of revenues in the first year and for costs it doesn't appear he has included any budget for sales & marketing, distribution, or employee salaries besides CEO and producer. The budget seems unrealistic for his goals and while I think a $30K fellowship would help, there would still be a huge funding gap to enable Darian to create a sustainable business

- While I appreciate the concept and could see myself playing the game, I am concerned it would have a challenging time gaining widespread adoption given the competitive environment in the video game industry. Without a brand name production company or design firm associated with the game, it will be difficult to attract customers

- Finally I think while this project is a novel idea, the amount of social change it may actual create is limited compared to the other projects I have read. This creates change through creating awareness of poverty, but it could be years until any social change is actually created

Hey Village, sorry there hasn't been much communication about Village the Game lately. Darian (that's me) has started working for a new company in Pasadena that offers educational games for kids in the virtual world www.Whyville.net while I haven't been able to devote anywhere near as much time to Village as I could before the new job, I'm learning so much from working with the people at Numedeon Inc that there's no doubt this opportunity is a huge step forward long term for Village even with the short term loss in time to commit to Village.

Here is the humble beginnings of Village Board Game. It only works in Firefox. Only tested on Firefox 2. It's all one file with lots of javascript. No multiplayer capability yet ... more than one person can play but only on the same computer. Most of the rules are still like Monopoly, but we'll be updating that as beta testers offer improvements.

To Play Test: http://www.villagethegame.com/kenya.html
To send feedback: boardgame1 [at] villagethegame.com