Imagine Cup 2010 promotes games that help improve world health, reduce poverty
Many video games feature competition among Mafia hit men, post-apocalyptic armies or cops and robbers. But how about a battle between medicines and disease?
Four students at Tufts University near Boston have created the game “Nanobots,” and are among 10 finalists in the U.S. Imagine Cup 2010 competition sponsored by Microsoft.
The competition, which will culminate in an event April 24-26 in Washington, D.C., challenges developers to come up with ways to reach the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of globally eradicating poverty, improving education and gender equality, and addressing the health needs of children, mothers and people with HIV/AIDS by 2015.
There are separate categories in the Imagine Cup competition for software design, digital media, and embedded design. The Tufts team, which calls itself “AwesomeSauce,” is competing in the game design category.
It’s nice to know that in some ways video games can be a force for good in this world.
Since Microsoft is sponsoring the competition you can expect that they’ll have some influence on the rules. All games must have been developed either using Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 or later; Microsoft Visual Studio or Microsoft Silverlight technologies. They have to be able to run in the Internet Explorer browser versions 7 or 8 and on Windows operating systems back to XP.
Nanobots can be a single- or multi-player game in which paticipants choose from a variety of weapons to try to fight off viruses or other diseases and rack up points for each success. The first player to reach 5,000 points wins.
“Nanobots are microscopic robots that expand to combat disease and heal the body from within,” said team member Cobin Dopkeen in a video presentation you can see here.
Nanobots has two game modes: “Petri Dish,” which is one large game arena on the screen; and “Campaign,” a series of specific missions, each with a goal of eradicating a particular disease.
Weapons” gamers can choose from include a “Pill Launcher” that fires a blast of antibiotics at the enemy, a “Shotgun” that fires a volley of syringes, a “Freeze Blaster” that stops, or at least slows down, advancing viruses. A “Dr. Molotov’s Cocktail” showers viruses with an elixir that dissolves them. And in a nod to the economic realities of medical research today, as players rack up points, they also get an increase in “federal funding” to buy bigger weapons to take on more viruses.
While designed to be fun, Nanobots has a serious mission of educating players on how medicines can fight disease, said Anit Das, another team member.
“One of the difficulties in medicine concerns the precision and accuracy of treatments because many procedures require precision on a very small scale, but today’s tools have a lot of difficulty with them,” Das explained.
Winners at the U.S. Imagine Cup competition advance to the world competition this July in Warsaw, Poland.
Among the other games finalists is a group called “Coffee-Powered Altruism” from Yale University. Their creation, Alterra, is a strategy game in which the goal is to effectively manage the development budget for a particular country or region. Players decide how much to spend to reduce childhood mortality, control population growth or invest in economic propserity.
From the University of Houston, team Ifrit Salsa offers “RoboRecycler,” which promotes a cleaner environment by collecting, sorting and recycling different items. And from the University of Southern California, team Cosmopolis created an educational game for primary school students to interact with peers around the world.
A list of all the finalists can be found here. There are some interesting projects in the software development category, too, which I’ll report on in my next post.
