Darfur is Dying

A high-profile activist game, here the player is cast as a refugee in the troubled Darfur region of the Sudan. To help players understand the plight of the residents of the refugee camps, they participate in two flavours of mini-game. First, the player selects from a range of refugees to go on a water-gathering mission, scampering through the blasted landscape with a dusty water jug in hopes to reach a distant well and return without being caught by roving militia members. To avoid the unspeakable consequences of such an outcome, the player's characters have the ability to hide behind various landscape features, should they be able to reach them in time. If players succeed at retrieving water, they then get to manage a refugee camp, delivering medicine and water from a communal area to help other refugees grow and harvest crops and build bricks to repair damaged buildings. In addition to regulating water and food levels, the camp has an overall health status and an ever-rising threat indicator which, when peaking, reduces the camp's health and destroys buildings. One can only achieve so much on this map before exhausting the water supply, which means many subsequent visits to the water-gathering mini-game. The goal is to survive a week in these grim circumstances. The game will prompt the game player to take real-life action in various ways and is filled with all sorts of casual contextual information to hammer home the nature and extent of the humanitarian crisis.