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Fat World
Game URL: www.fatworld.org/
Developer: Persuasive Games
Non-Profit: PBS, CPB funding, content
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Project Lead: Ian Bogost
Funding Sources: CPB
Sponsors/In-kind donations: PBS
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Brief Description
FATWORLD is a video game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S.
Full Description
Existing approaches to nutrition advocacy fail to communicate the aggregate effect of everyday health practices. It's one thing to explain that daily exercise and nutrition are important, but people, young and old, have a very hard time wrapping their heads around outcomes five, 10, 50 years away. You can choose starting weights and health conditions, including predispositions towards ailments like diabetes, heart disease, or food allergies. You'll have to construct menus and recipes, decide what to eat and what to avoid, exercise (or not), and run a restaurant business to serve the members of your community. FATWORLD comes with numerous foods, recipes, and meal plans, or players can create their own from the foods in their pantry or their imaginations. FATWORLD is the fifth project to emerge from ITVS's Electric Shadows initiative, a special fund for innovative Web-original projects that offer untold, provocative stories by today's independent storytellers. Electric Shadows projects include: OFF THE MAP, the Webby Award-winning site that takes users on a multimedia tour of works by backyard visionary artists; BEYOND THE FIRE which explores the human cost of war through the stories of 15 teenage refugees; FACE TO FACE, connecting the experiences of Japanese Americans in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor with those confronting Arab and Muslim Americans in a post- 9-11 America; and CIRCLE OF STORIES where Native culture bearers guide users through the art, heritage and legacy of the Native American oral tradition. The 2007, the alternate reality game WORLD WITHOUT OIL, created a global oil shock and enlisted the world�s collective imagination to document the crisis with blogs, videos and images. ITVS Interactive developed a special Electric Shadows call for proposals targeting independent game developers. FATWORLD was the top project selected by a panel of game industry leaders and marks the first online video game funded by ITVS. All Electric Shadows projects are available online as a special feature of the Independent Lens site at PBS.org.
Target Audience: Children
Social Issues Addressed: public health,
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The game's goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations.
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