Third World Farmer in the Modern World.

              When I began my search for online educational games, at first I ran into a little difficulty, most of the games were geared towards children. I decided to refocus my search and look for games that would appeal to high school and college students. Then after experimenting and playing a number of game, I found 3rd World Farmer, which was created at IT-University in Copenhagen, in the Spring 2005. It was a serious game that blended school topics such as business, economics, culture, history and geography. 

            3rd World Farmer centers around you managing a farm in a dried up desert area of Sub-Saharan Africa. This realistic survival online game gives you insight on how tough it is to operate a farm, while dealing with family issues, raising children, struggling with poverty, and dealing with the extreme hardships. 

            This game is an eye opener because after each game comes to an end, it reminds the player that millions of people in Africa are starving each day. And it makes us realize that there are farmers and families in struggling in developing nations. In addition the game has the player will make uncomfortable decisions in order to help the common good of the family. It not only challenges you to keep yourself and family alive while dealing with disease, but other issues like medical bills, bad crops, government corruption, Guerilla forces invaded your land, war, accepting money to store chemical waste on your farm, allow Guerrilla terrorist to set up a base on your property, and allowing people to growth opium on your land. 

            While keeping your family alive, you budget your money by buying and planting the best crops for its value (corn, wheat, cotton and peanuts), hoping it will yield enough money so you can grow more crops, which will later help you expand your farm. If you are lucky and begin to have cash flow, you will be able to purchase items like plows, and tractors to improve your crop yields. The farmer can expand their farm by adding sheds, wells and barns. But just like real life, investments can be a risky. Hardships can occur which could lead to wells drying up, barns can be destroyed by fire rebel fighters, and livestock may be stolen or die from disease. Family members can also die from disease so its important to make sure they visit the doctor to keep their health up. 

How to Play:

            The game starts off with the player getting $50 and a family of four; a father, mother, son and daughter. Before each season, the player will need to pick a crop to grow from corn, wheat, cotton and peanuts. The selection for all crops, livestock and tools are on the left side of the screen. Other decisions also need to be made and that includes having a baby. Starting the game at a humble beginning may not be a good time to bring a child into the world, but in the long run, later on down the road, the kids will grow older and will be able to contribute around the farm. As the seasons fly by, you try to build on your success by buying more expensive crops, better equipment to help along with the farming, building sheds, water wells and barns for chickens, pigs, cattle and elephants. 

            To plant the crops, the player will need to click on the crops, calculate how many they can buy with the amount that is listed on their bank. Once the icon pertaining to the appropriate crop is selected, the player needs to drag the crops in the field.  If you desire to have the mother get pregnant, then you need to click on the mother icon and select that they will have a baby. On the right side of the screen there is an arrow and that will make the seasons move, within 5 seconds 9 months goes by and the crop is harvested and a new child will be added to the family. As time goes by, its important to monitor the families strength and health. If their health declines that is the time to administer their medicine. This can be done by clicking on the character. 

Displayed on the upper left are the icons of the various items you will need to succeed in the game.

            Annual reports are issued after each season to explain how your crops sold and it also notifies you if there were droughts that could have affected your crops. To succeed, you need to have a  good business sense to understand what crops will grow in Africa. You also need to be strategic thinker to make sure you and your family survive and become successful. Being business savvy and investing in communications and to build a road will help with sales because this will make it easier to bring your product to the markets. Its also a good idea to buy crop insurance which will help your family when your crops fail due to a natural fire or to rebels forces entering your property.

            As you become successful you can help improve your community by buying a school and clinic. This will help improved health and education services in your area. If you donate to a local politician, this will help keep peace in your area and prevent the opposing forces from entering your property. Once you purchase the communications, add a road, build a clinic and school, support a politician and purchase the insurance you will win the game.

After every season an annual report is given to display what took place during in the region, your income pertaining to livestock and crops sold and the surviving family members,

Preparing for the presentation.

            Our group brainstormed in class on ways on how we were going to prepare for the presentation and rubric. While in class we decided to use Google drive to share ideas and thoughts on information pertaining to our project. This was an excellent way for our project to discuss the project without actually needing to meet. For our presentation, we originally thought about using Google, but as a group, we felt it was very similar to PowerPoint, so we opted to use Prezi instead because it added an extra dimension with the movement, allowing use to pinpoint what we wanted to discuss during the presentation. We added snapshots and video clips from our game into the Prezi to show what the game looked like.

            Our group continued to use Google drive as we designed a rubric to help us rate the Third World Farmer game. We came up with two designs, but eventually voted on the second idea. The rubric had six categories; layout and design, navigation, Instructions, goals interaction and feedback. The group then added a point system 0 meaning poor, 3 being average and 5 points being the best possible score for each category.

            We decided to start out by rating the layout and design. Although there wasn’t a lot of sophisticated moving graphics, the four members of the group, which includes me,  felt there was a lot of thought and details that went into this game.  We believed that the concept along with the design and elements of the game could help students understand what was going on in this survival game. We all believed this area was worth 5 points. From there we gradually discussed how to make our rubric less sophisticated removing various components out of the rubric.  

            Coming up with the next five categories were a little challenging, but as we played the game more the rubric evolved as we started applying key words to our rubric such as navigation, instruction, goals, interaction and feedback. We decided to use those five words to help explain the game.

Universal game when teaching

            Although this game is very serious because it features real world events, Third World Farmer can easily be blended into a number of school topics such as business, economics, culture, history and geography. As an English teacher, I discussed with my group I could use this to segue into The Grapes of Wrath written by John Steinbeck which discusses hardships farmers had during the Great Depression when the Midwest experience a drought which caused extreme hardships to the agricultural world. This trickled down and led to foreclosures on numerous farms forcing farmers to flee Oklahoma and to find work else where, mainly in California.

Cover of Novel written by John Steinbeck in 1939

            After playing third world farmer, it makes you realize that every decision, good or bad can make or break you when it comes to survival. After playing this game, it allows the player to donate money that will help the starving people in the region of the world. This came is addicting, but it also creates awareness about what is going on in another part of the world.

In addition to English, this game is now available in Brazilian Portuguese, Hungarian, Italian, German, Czech, French and Spanish.

References:
Blancato, J. (2006, July 6) In Third World Farmer - One Bad year. Escapist Magazine. Retrieved June 13, 2015, from http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/editorials/op-ed/1025-3rd-World-Farmer-One-bad-year

McCall, J. (2009). Gaming the Past, Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History. Routledge, NY.

Ball, L., Thames, H., & Phelps, G. (2008). Content knowledge for teaching: What makes it special?

Journal of Teacher Education, 59(5), 389–407.