Comments for entry "Death by Food" at Dilbert.com Blog

Comment from inspirer

TuePMCSTE_Rthth

The game you propose is so lame and boring I couldn't even read through the whole description. if you're thinking about educational games, see what smart people have to say about it: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/tangential-learning http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/gamification

Comment from btw2worlds

TuePMCSTE_Rthth

Game elements that you need. 1. First person "shooter" 2. Ranger character (swords, knives, axes, bow and arrows) 3. Evil monsters 4. blood and death 5. Ranger uses martial arts and parkour The ranger hunts the evil monsters but needs food to sustain his life. He has to find his food or barter for it. More nutritious food gives the ranger a higher level of health. He can eat some mushrooms for health but other mushrooms make him vomit or die. He can save a farmer from a monster and get milk and cheese. He kills another demon and gets access to a fresh spring. The point of the game is to show that good nutrition makes you a better killer.

Comment from Homerhoff

TuePMCSTE_Rthth

I actually think that the concept of the game has merit, probably best as a handheld app - sometimes silliness and good humour create enjoyable game play (who would have looked at the first "Plants vs. Zombies" pitch and thought it was a surefire smash hit?). However, I'm afraid I need to chime in on the general disagreement with using food as weapons against those with allergies. You're singling out people who deal with these life-affecting conditions everyday - at home, at school, at restaurants, at work. The game's ultimate failure is the inevitable headline "Lactose-intolerant student hospitalized in schoolyard prank mimicking a Scott Adams video game."

Comment from existoid

TuePMCSTE_Rthth

Games whose purpose if first to educate and second to entertain will end up doing neither.

Comment from Dynalyte

TuePMCSTE_Rthth

Not a good idea. Needs to bake quite a bit longer, and it's probably got the wrong ingredients to start with...

Comment from harrykrak

TueAMCSTE_Rthth

You don't know where it is? It has its own wiki page. What sort of geek are you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilberito (The game link is at the bottom)

Comment from daft_username

TueAMCSTE_Rthth

Just to recap, you want a game which teaches: 1. nutrition and a healthy lifestyle by performing a sedentary activity (playing a video game) 2. housebreaking is ok if it's for food 3. that it's ok to exploit other people's weakness for your own gain That's going to be a really hard sell! Kids who play first person shooter games don't want health advice - they want blood, gore and escapism, and big mac with large fries...or maybe pizza.

Comment from Stui

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

Scott Said: "My hypothesis is that a kid who spends hundreds of hours playing a game about nutrition will develop a good sense for how much food he can eat every day without getting fat, and which foods are necessary for a balanced diet." Well, My hypothesis is that if a kid spends hundreds of hours on a game, he's going to learn how to play the game and will probably do it while scarfing Pizza and fizzy drinks. I doubt they will absorb bugger all about nutrition.

Comment from swp

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

http://www.freegamearchive.com/download-games/freeware/simulators/the-dilberito-game/15263

Comment from veti

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

Googled 'dilbert flash game'. This is the top hit: http://www.flashgamesplayer.com/Free/Dilbert-Comic/Play.html I agree that most every educational game, by definition, is doomed before it gets off the drawing board. However, the best games will tend to educate people as a byproduct. I learned a lot about probability from roleplaying games, and Angry Birds teaches toddlers today something about physics. (Not necessarily perfectly accurate, of course, but the basic concepts of trajectories, and that "if you knock out a strut it falls over" - it's all learning.)

Comment from humilityrocks

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

Sorry Scott, As a gamer, I have to say that sounds very high on the "lame" scale of things. Playing vegetables might be even less fun than eating them. That being said, I do agree that there is a huge amount of potential for gaming technology to make it educational and awesome. Imagine learning a language, but in a fully 3D interactive environ that was fun to navigate through with tasks / briefing that were increasingly in the language you're were engaged in. That wouldn't feel like Latin, but might help get you there if it was clever enough. You could do a "wii" experience of Shakespeare, where you have to hit your mark and say your lines correctly to proceed. That's not the lottery winner idea, but you get the direction. Huge power of gaming engines to display incredible and complicated things visually - how could this NOT be upgrading our classrooms, virtual and otherwise? Think early call of duty games, but German becomes a part of the game and you learn at least some as you go... and are rewarded by getting to blow things up if you did well. I think for this to work, it would need to be a bit more subtle. Medical / health items are food stuffs... with sugary foods being of low value and healthy food items being more powerful or high value. You would desire the healthy food items and in the context of a Doom, might even actively look for them... then be really happy / relieved when you found some. That could work across multiple games in theory... while reinforcing through repetition a message that eating well is better for you. Maybe, I think you still have the hurdle of vegetables just not tasting as good as junk food - every single meal. And that is a lot of conditioning to overcome.

Comment from Dingbat

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

I agree with Icebrain: "With so much stuff competing for one's attention, building a game that hook up kids for hundreds of hours is a daunting challenge, and doing it with an "educational theme" is ten times harder." However, I read down the comments and saw this from AndrewAMD "I am suddenly reminded of the game Chex Quest, where they took the game Doom and modified it into a family-friendly game." That took me back to my and my oldest son's first introduction to video games. He was too young to play on his own, but we took the CD of the back of the cereal box and played together. He sat on my lap while I worked the controls. It wasn't long before he was off on his own, of course - but we played together for several months at least. Maybe this sort of thing is best introduced for very young kids, playing with their parents. Parents are more likely to want to push the nutrition thing. In that case, however, you definitely have to have effects that are funny - and appealing to young kids, but not offensive to moms. Maybe expand the concept - so that you grow a veggie garden for extra protection. I think it would be funnier (for very young kids) to have really stupid enemies that voluntarily eat the candy and soda you leave lying around to thwart them - and then not notice that it makes them too weak to fight. Little kids love to outsmart stupid bad guys.

Comment from icebrain

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

"My hypothesis is that a kid who spends hundreds of hours playing a game about nutrition..." There is a big flaw on your idea. There is a reason no educational game ever became a hit. No kid is going to play the game for hundreds of hours if it's not awesome. And just "awesome" doesn't cut, it needs to be better than Call of duty, Madden NFL, Nascar, NBA Jam,..........(thousands of other games)............, Angry birds, Fruit ninja, Doodle Jump, etc. And your game would compete not just against other games, but also with internet, movies, TV, real world sports and comic books. With so much stuff competing for one's attention, building a game that hook up kids for hundreds of hours is a daunting challenge, and doing it with an "educational theme" is ten times harder. So good luck with that! :-)

Comment from Mark Naught

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

@ST_Lawson Yes, I think that's exactly what he was saying. Let me paraphrase Scott's article: "Life-threatening allergic reactions in children are absolutely hilarious, especially when you can trick kids into killing each other with them. Unless, of course, it's a peanut allergy. In that case, it's been over-done and has lost its comic value." Well, ST__Lawson, I for one join you in condemning this idea for training large numbers of children to mortally wound each other with common foodstuffs, which is the obvious and totally correct conclusion about Scott's ultimate goal we should all draw from this posting. Scott: may you suffer the sniffles of a thousand allergies and die of old age in a world where Dilbert is only remembered as a warning against promoting child abuse.

Comment from Querious

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

I wanted to try Dilberitos but I couldn't get them at nearby grocery stores. It seemed like a good concept, though I think 50% RDA vitamin thresholds would have made more sense nutritionally despite 100% being easier to market. Did anyone here eat them? Were they tasty?

Comment from wootah

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

The game, is here: http://joking.narod.ru/64.htm Of course it is hosted in russia, so who knows when the page operator notices it jump in popularity from being linked here and switches it for something 'not-innocent' While playing I got dilbert's weight down to 100 pounds which HAS to be pretty unhealthy. Lucky for dilbert (or unlucky) the game hopped him back up to 175 pounds from which I could start losing weight again. After a certain score, you can put the name of your nemesis down, which then proceeds to show dilbert standing over his grave with the name of the nemesis you outlived. I put down 'Dilberito" which seemed very fitting because, well, it is long gone.

Comment from callcopse

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

If anyone has not found the Dilberito game this appears to be it: http://games.yonan.ro/play-9783-Dilberito-2-8.html It's OK but not really compelling. Fancy pork chops now though.

Comment from ST_Lawson

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

So what you're saying is that it's funny for a kid to throw milk at a kid with a milk allergy but that the same thing with peanuts isn't? Does it make a difference if the kid with the milk allergy would have the same reaction to milk as you would typically associate with a life-threatening peanut allergy, because that's what my daughter would be classified as. It's not lactose intolerance, it's not a "she drinks milk and gets diaria", it's a "she comes in contact with a table where milk was spilled three days ago and not thoroughly wiped up with hot water and soap....she gets hives on her skin, trouble breathing, gets and epi-pen shot and taken to the emergency room" situation. Yes, peanut allergies are, in general, more severe than other allergies, but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other life-threatening food allergies that are relatively common and I don't think that kids should be encouraged to make kids with food allergies come in contact with the foods that they are allergic to.

Comment from AndrewAMD

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

I am suddenly reminded of the game Chex Quest, where they took the game Doom and modified it into a family-friendly game. You're a chex piece with a pair of eyes and you shoot slimey aliens, I think. I used to play that one too much as a kid.

Comment from EMU

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

As long as the shooter is the guy who grows strong on steak, sausage and beer...