''Food Force'' is an

educational game Educational games are games explicitly designed with educational purposes, or which have incidental or secondary educational value. All types of games may be used in an educational environment, however educational games are games that are design ...

published by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in 2005. Due to its content, it is considered a serious game (game with educational purpose). Players take on missions to distribute food in a

famine A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, Demographic trap, population imbalance, widespread poverty, an Financial crisis, economic catastrophe or government policies. Th ...

-affected country and to help it to recover and become self-sufficient again. At the same time they learn about hunger in the real world and the WFP's work to prevent it. In 2011, a new, socially interactive game was launched in November by the World Food Programme in partnership with

Konami , is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational video game company, video game and entertainment company headquartered in Chūō, Tokyo, Chūō, Tokyo, it also produces and distributes trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, pachinko machin ...

. The game, which takes place entirely on

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

, is amongst the first games ever to feature a real world impact through virtual goods.

Gameplay

The game takes place on the fictional island of Sheylan in the

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by th ...

, which is suffering from both

drought A drought is defined as drier than normal conditions.Douville, H., K. Raghavan, J. Renwick, R.P. Allan, P.A. Arias, M. Barlow, R. Cerezo-Mota, A. Cherchi, T.Y. Gan, J. Gergis, D. Jiang, A. Khan, W. Pokam Mba, D. Rosenfeld, J. Tierney, an ...

and

civil war A civil war or intrastate war is a war between organized groups within the same state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies ...

. The player's character is a rookie who has joined a team of UN experts, including a nutritionist, a

logistics Logistics is generally the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation. In a general business sense, logistics manages the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of consumption to meet the requirements of ...

officer, a pilot, an appeals officer, and the director of food purchasing. The game contains six missions: # Air surveillance: Locating hungry citizens in a helicopter # Energy pacs: Produce a balanced diet of

rice Rice is the seed of the grass species ''Oryza sativa'' (Asian rice) or less commonly ''Oryza glaberrima ''Oryza glaberrima'', commonly known as African rice, is one of the two domesticated rice species. It was first domesticated and grown i ...

cooking oil Cooking oil is plant, animal, or synthetic liquid fat used in frying, baking, and other types of cooking. It is also used in food preparation and flavoring not involving heat, such as salad dressings and bread dips, and may be called edible oil. ...

bean A bean is the seed of several plants in the family Fabaceae, which are used as vegetables for human or animal food. They can be cooked in many different ways, including boiling, frying, and baking, and are used in many traditional dishes th ...

sugar Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Compound sugars, also called disaccharides or double ...

and

salt Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts; salt in the form of a natural crystalline mineral is known as rock salt or halite. Salt is present in vast quantitie ...

within a budget of only 30 cents per day # Food drop: drop food supplies in a target zone, while compensating for wind direction # Locate and dispatch: co-ordinate supplies of purchased and donated food from around the world # Food run: Lead a food convoy to a depot, dealing with hazards like

landmines A land mine is an explosive device concealed under or on the ground and designed to destroy or disable enemy targets, ranging from combatants to vehicles and tanks, as they pass over or near it. Such a device is typically detonated automati ...

and roadblocks # Future farming: Use food aid to help a village develop over 10 years, by investing in it carefully with

nutrition Nutrition is the biochemical and physiological process by which an organism uses food to support its life. It provides organisms with nutrients, which can be metabolized to create energy and chemical structures. Failure to obtain sufficient n ...

training, schooling, "food for work" and

HIV/AIDS Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus. Following initial infection an individual ...

treatment Most of the gameplay is arcade oriented, with time-limited sequences. All six missions could be played through in under an hour, though players might replay the individual missions, as their high scores could be uploaded online for worldwide comparison with other players, until another game, under the same name, was made by the WFP and

Availability

The game was freely downloadable, but with the release of a game under the same name by WFP, the game's website has been shut down along with all of the official download links. The game is still mirrored on various websites, but there is no official download link. It had versions for the

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

users could use

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are m ...

to install the Windows version of the game and the QuickTime bundled with the package. The Macintosh version of the game is

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

only and as such, the game could only be run on

Macs with

Mac OS X Jaguar Mac OS X Jaguar (version 10.2) is the third major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It superseded Mac OS X 10.1 and preceded Mac OS X Panther. The operating system was released on August 23, 2002 either for sing ...

or higher or on

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

powered Macs running Mac OS X Tiger to Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Users are encouraged to burn the game onto

CDs The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in Octo ...

and distribute it to friends. Developed by the British

studio A studio is an artist or worker's workroom. This can be for the purpose of acting, architecture, painting, pottery (ceramics), sculpture, origami, woodworking, scrapbooking, photography, graphic design, filmmaking, animation, industrial design ...

Playerthree and the Italian company

Deepend Falco van den Aker, professionally known as Deepend is a Dutch DJ/producer. He gained international recognition after his remix of Matt Simons' " Catch & Release" peaked at number one in five countries and the European Airplay charts. The DJ racke ...

, the program uses Macromedia for gameplay and

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avai ...

for video. The ''Food Force'' website also had lesson plans for teachers, reports on recent WFP work, a high score table and other features.

''Food Force 2''

'' Food Force 2'', based on ''Food Force'', has been developed as

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

under the terms of version 3 of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

. It is

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software r ...

as it is written in the Python programming language, and runs on platforms including the One Laptop Per Child XO and the Sugar desktop environment. Food Force 2 is available for download on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X platforms.

References

{{Reflist

External links

''Food Force Facebook'' official site

''Food Force'' official website

''Food Force'' official website (Latinamerican Edition)Worldview
A teacher's resource on the Food Force website
''Food Force - Bowl 2006''

''Food Force on OLPC''''FoodForce2 site''Friends of the World Food Program
United States agency helping raise funds and awareness about global hunger
World Food Program
UN Agency
''Pictures for truth''
A game for Amnesty International released in 2008
memellon
Developers of the Latinamerican Edition released in October 2008 Helicopter video games Humanitarian video games Hunger Advergames 2005 video games Windows games Classic Mac OS games Linux games Video games about food and drink Video games developed in Italy Video games developed in the United Kingdom Freeware games