England seems to have a problem.
I’m not talking about dental hygiene (some of them have very lovely teeth!), nor am I referring to whatever it is they try to pass off as “food” and “cuisine” over there. This is something much more serious, and potentially deadly.
Children can’t cross the street.
Despite the best efforts of Britain’s finest, “tweenagers” are still running wildly into the road and throwing themselves into the paths of oncoming vehicles, and people are finally fed up. Now, I think this could have been easily solved if they would just drive on the correct side of the road, but a group of researchers had a much better idea — they made an MMO.
In the middle of last month, the UK’s Department for Transportation quietly released Code of Everand, a game that replaces busy streets with ‘spirit channels’, and help teach kids road safety by requiring them to “safely traverse [the] lanes by looking left and right”. (Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of old, but we’re not really up on the “Street Crossing MMO” scene.) If you properly look both ways, you’ll earn Concentration Points when you can then use to kill monsters.
Joking aside, it’s an interesting idea. It sounds like the developers, Area/Code, put some serious thought into the game as it boasts a quest system, weapons and armor to upgrade, and what sounds like a rudimentary socialization system. It’s not World of Warcraft, but it seems to have more depth than a lot of the educational games we see get thrown around the internet. Whether it’s more effective than, say, telling your kids to look both ways before crossing the street so they don’t die, remains to be seen.
Regardless of if the mechanics of the game teach kids to be safer, one thing’s for sure — if kids get addicted to an MMO, they won’t be running around outside getting hit by cars.
[Via The Guardian]
