Ayiti: The Cost of Life game will be released in just a few short weeks.
Ayiti: The Cost of Life is a role-playing video game in which the player assumes the roles of family members living in rural Haiti. Over the course of the game, the player must choose among and balance various goals, such as achieving education, making money, staying healthy, and maintaining happiness while encountering unexpected events. The player must make many decisions that contribute to or detract from achieving his or her chosen goals.
Background
Playing 4 Keeps is an innovative youth media project, in which a team of Global Kids Leaders at South Shore High School are gaining leadership and game design skills that they will use to develop and produce a socially conscious online game each year.
Playing 4 Keeps has been selected as one of eleven groups in Microsoft's Partners in Learning Mid-Tier initiative, which seeks to find and support "pockets of innovation" for increasing digital literacy and career readiness.
The program was launched as a highly successful pilot project in 2002-2003. This year, participants chose to focus their game on the general topic of poverty as an obstacle to education, based on their learning about the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and about obstacles to receiving an adequate education that youth face around the world. They then decided to use Haiti as a case study and setting for the game.