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News from the Future of Public Media
Innovation in Focus: ITVS’s Fatworld
email discuss Posted by Bree Bowman on Apr 1, 2008 at 10:52 AM
Using video games to educate the public on diet, nutrition and making informed decisions.
As American youth reach unprecedented levels of obesity, ITVS Interactive and PBS’s Emmy-award–winning weekly series Independent Lens are using a new kind of media to help find a solution to this complex problem. FATWORLD is an experimental, online video game that explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition and socioeconomics in the United States. Launched in January 2008, and downloaded 53,000 times in the two weeks after its release, the project demonstrates how public media can open a dialogue on deeply rooted social and economic problems, as well as the increasing opportunities to reach out to youth through online games and other digital media.
FATWORLD takes players to a virtual world where they create characters and make decisions that affect their lives, including purchasing a house or a car, buying groceries and creating menus. The game uses “classic” video game music and graphics that evoke memories of Super Mario Bros. or old Atari games, but gives players a sense of the consequences that dietary and nutrition decisions can have on an individual’s life. More importantly, the game draws attention to the relationship between socioeconomic status and education levels and making healthy decisions on nutrition. Players can create characters of varying ages and socioeconomic status, which, in turn, dictate the options that the characters have for housing, transportation and nutrition. FATWORLD presents an interactive representation of the complex balance between circumstance, consequence and informed decision-making.
“This project affords a unique opportunity to partner with a new kind of media maker to create something that is truly experimental,” writes Cathy Fischer, senior producer, ITVS Interactive, in Beyond the Box, the ITVS newsletter. “It is critical that those of us working in public media look beyond traditional broadcast as a way of reaching audiences.”
The game is free and downloadable from the FATWORLD website, and players can also find diet and nutrition resources to learn more about what they have seen in the game. The project is an innovative, multi-media approach to help youth realize the importance of weighing (no pun intended) the consequences of all of the lifestyle choices that they make.
ITVS, like the Center for Social Media, is part of a group of nonprofit organizations with a common goal: to push forward into the future of public media. In an initiative funded by the Ford Foundation, the group’s work fosters experimentation to forge the public media structures and projects of tomorrow.
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