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Code of Everand: RPG for Saving Lives
Posted by Hsing Wei on 01-04-10Moving with their constituency, British PSAs are experimenting with interactivity. The Department of Transportation’s ongoing road safety campaign recently launched Code of Everand, an MMORPG aimed at reducing the number of teenage deaths and injuries from unsafe road crossing. In designing the game, New York based developer Area/Code took inspiration not from other serious games, but rather from kid-focused MMOs such as RuneScape, Maple Story, Dofus, Dragon Quest and World of Warcraft. Linking road crossing with the random battles that happen throughout traditional RPG environments, players as Pathfinders must safely traverse dangerous ‘spirit channels’ where monsters lurk by looking left and right, spotting creatures, battling with a range of attacks/spells, and accruing Concentration Points. Players can earn cash towards customizing their character via an array of clothing, armour and weaponry options.
The design philosophy is not about broadcasting a standardized message, but about expanding perceived control over tools that implicitly reshape understandings about how to engage with the underlying situation. As Kevin Slavin, Area/Code Managing Director explains, “Chess can teach you about logic, football can teach you about teamwork, real-time strategy games can teach you about planning. All games can teach you about how interactive systems behave, about succeeding through discipline and practice, and about creative problem-solving… The opportunity is to harness the ways that games build, influence and reinforce cognitive skills, and apply that to a particular problem or subject domain.”