Serious Games for Autonomous Learning

The game I played is Third World Farmer: "an experiment in the genre of Serious Games, it simulates some of the real-world mechanisms that cause and sustain poverty in 3rd world countries."In the game, the player gets to run a farm located in Africa and is faced with difficult choices that bring by poverty and war.

In the game setting, players will see many different reasons that result in money loss or even the death of family members, for instance: civil war, corrupt officials, corn harvest fails, etc. After each turns, the player will get a brief summary of balance and a short description of reasons lead to this results. 

 To better understand the meaning that game designers want to convey through, students/players should fully comprehend the explanation/reasons of "Event of the Year", this often provided randomly, however, after playing several turns, the player will gradually realized one accidental events can lead to serious outcome like starvation or family death. This is unimaginable for people who lives in industrialized society because none of these events will happened on us. After playing this game, I will ask students to write a report of what events they've encountered in this game and what kind of actions they think can takes to prevent those happened. 

To assess the students' understanding, they need to summarize the issues and events which lead to a specific results; put forward suggestions of how they think can help to improve the current situation. Finally, through playing, I hope students can understand the initial intent of game developer, start to make change from them own.