A cloudy December morning on DCU’s St Patrick’s Campus is probably not what comes to mind for most when they think ‘award winning game launch’, but this was the site where charity Trocaire decided to release the first of hopefully many educational video games. The term ‘educational video game’ is a term that often connotes stiff uninteresting games, in spite of the regard that many people have for games such as Oregan Trail and Typing of the Dead. While Project Honduras is a simple game, it accomplishes what it sets out to do in an engaging manner and resultantly has won the International Educational Game Competition 2018.

To briefly explain the game, one plays as either Javier or Andrea, who are based on real relief workers in Honduras. It revolves around distributing a finite number of workers among tasks with a time limit, which is more challenging to work around than one might think. My strategy of talking to everyone in the area, in order to allocate tasks most effectively, left me rushing toward the end of the latter two levels. The score sheet at the end informs the player which areas were adequately delegated to and which were lacking. This allows the player to improve with hindsight, but also teaches the games purported 10-14 year old demographic, represented at the launch by the students of Gaelscoil Bharra in Cabra, that in the midst of a disaster it is difficult to make the right decision in the allotted time. While the game is fun, I am not going to pretend that there is much here for those outside the target demographic and the length of the game is perfectly suited for play during a school period at the expense of recreational value. I would excuse this however as the scope and nature of the game were to be expected from developer Eighty Twenty when educating primary school children was their aim.

The lack of content is not due to a lack of possibility. I could see this concept easily expanded upon by expanding the number of tasks. Adding task timers could force players to deal with a choice between two quick tasks and one long one. This does raise the question, why have there not been more substantive games that deal with this subject matter? Outside of 11 Bit Studio’s this War of Mine, I struggle to think of games about ordinary people living amid a disaster (Deputy Games editor Kylie, recommends Sunset) .

It is clear that Trocaire is also baffled by the lack of games of this type and have hence set up a competition which they call Game Changers, which is aimed at primary and secondary schools to create board, card or video games that explore, ‘Development Education theme’. This means that the games must explore an issue faced by developing nations. The competition aims to get students thinking about education and developing nations in a new way and there are few goals more admirable. Details of the competition can be found here.

If you are beyond the age of an eligible contestant as I suspect many of our readers are, Trocaire is looking for volunteers to playtest their future games, if you are interested please email stephen.farley@trocaire.org.