Incredible Opportunity

I purposefully waited to announce this. Probably because I didn't want this announcement to be the big reason why everyone came here and read what I wrote.

The United Nations has hired my department here at Champlain College to make a game. My department is the Emergent Media Center, hence why it's in my links on the side. The game they have asked us to work on is a game to try and help end violence against women. We're working with Population Media Center who have made many successful soap operas and radio dramas in multiple countries to help promote literacy, AIDS awareness, and awareness on other issues.

This Friday those of us working on the project will be traveling to South Africa. It's going to be a very long flight, which we're all planning on bringing a lot of travel games, but we're all pretty excited for this opportunity. After we fly down we'll be there for about 7 days doing research. I know this doesn't sound like a lot of time but after those 7 days we're going to fly back to Burlington, probably have a meeting including the whole department, then go to our first day of classes.

This is definitely going to be an amazing chance for all of us working at the department to really do something wonderful to help people. We're all looking forward to really buckling down and creating a great product. We just have to be careful, because someone said this about novels but I know it applies to games as well.

"You can have a wonderful idea, but there are only a handful of ways to tell it the right way, and over a million ways to tell it wrong way."

I believe it was Orson Scott Card who said that, or something similar as I probably paraphrased it, but the meaning is still there. There are going to be a handful of ways to properly make this game and a million ways to not make it properly. We're going to have to strive and push for one of those few proper ways to do it.