''Food Force'' is an educational video game published by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in 2005. It is a

serious game A serious game or applied game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. The "serious" adjective is generally prepended to refer to video games used by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, he ...

(game with educational purpose). Players take on missions to distribute food in a

famine A famine is a widespread scarcity of food caused by several possible factors, including, but not limited to war, natural disasters, crop failure, widespread poverty, an Financial crisis, economic catastrophe or government policies. This phenom ...

-affected country and to help it to recover and become self-sufficient again. At the same time they learn about hunger in the real world and the WFP's work to prevent it.

Gameplay

The game takes place on the fictional island of Sheylan in the

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or approximately 20% of the water area of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia (continent), ...

, which is suffering from both

drought A drought is a period of drier-than-normal conditions.Douville, H., K. Raghavan, J. Renwick, R.P. Allan, P.A. Arias, M. Barlow, R. Cerezo-Mota, A. Cherchi, T.Y. Gan, J. Gergis, D. Jiang, A. Khan, W. Pokam Mba, D. Rosenfeld, J. Tierney, ...

and

civil war A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same Sovereign state, state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies.J ...

. The player's character is a rookie who has joined a team of UN experts, including a

nutritionist A nutritionist is a person who advises others on matters of food and Human nutrition, nutrition and their impacts on health. Some people specialize in particular areas, such as sports nutrition, public health, or animal nutrition, among other disci ...

, a

logistics Logistics is the part of supply chain management that deals with the efficient forward and reverse flow of goods, services, and related information from the point of origin to the Consumption (economics), point of consumption according to the ...

officer, a pilot, an appeals officer, and the director of food purchasing. The game contains six missions: # Air surveillance: Locating hungry citizens in a helicopter # Energy pacs: Produce a

balanced diet A healthy diet is a diet that maintains or improves overall health. A healthy diet provides the body with essential nutrition: fluid, macronutrients such as protein, micronutrients such as vitamins, and adequate fibre and food energy. A health ...

rice Rice is a cereal grain and in its Domestication, domesticated form is the staple food of over half of the world's population, particularly in Asia and Africa. Rice is the seed of the grass species ''Oryza sativa'' (Asian rice)—or, much l ...

cooking oil Cooking oil (also known as edible oil) is a plant or animal liquid fat used in frying, baking, and other types of cooking. Oil allows higher cooking temperatures than water, making cooking faster and more flavorful, while likewise distributing h ...

bean A bean is the seed of some plants in the legume family (Fabaceae) used as a vegetable for human consumption or animal feed. The seeds are often preserved through drying (a ''pulse''), but fresh beans are also sold. Dried beans are traditi ...

sugar Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose Glucose is a sugar with the Chemical formula#Molecular formula, molecul ...

and

salt In common usage, salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl). When used in food, especially in granulated form, it is more formally called table salt. In the form of a natural crystalline mineral, salt is also known as r ...

within a budget of only 30 cents per day # Food drop: drop food supplies in a target zone, while compensating for wind direction # Locate and dispatch: co-ordinate supplies of purchased and donated food from around the world # Food run: Lead a food convoy to a depot, dealing with hazards like

landmines A land mine, or landmine, is an explosive weapon often concealed under or camouflaged on the ground, and designed to destroy or disable enemy targets as they pass over or near it. Land mines are divided into two types: anti-tank mines, whic ...

and roadblocks # Future farming: Use food aid to help a village develop over 10 years, by investing in it carefully with

nutrition Nutrition is the biochemistry, biochemical and physiology, physiological process by which an organism uses food and water to support its life. The intake of these substances provides organisms with nutrients (divided into Macronutrient, macro- ...

training, schooling, "food for work" and

HIV/AIDS The HIV, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that attacks the immune system. Without treatment, it can lead to a spectrum of conditions including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). It is a Preventive healthcare, pr ...

treatment Most of the gameplay is arcade oriented, with time-limited sequences. All six missions could be played through in under an hour, though players might replay the individual missions, as their high scores could be uploaded online for worldwide comparison with other players, until another game, under the same name, was made by the WFP and

Konami , commonly known as Konami, , is a Japanese multinational entertainment company and video game developer and video game publisher, publisher headquartered in Chūō, Tokyo, Chūō, Tokyo. The company also produces and distributes trading card ...

Release

The game was freely downloadable, but with the release of a game under the same name by WFP, the game's website has been shut down along with all of the official download links. The game is still mirrored on various websites, but there is no official download link. It had versions for the

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

users could use

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

to install the Windows version of the game and the QuickTime bundled with the package. The Macintosh version of the game is

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

only and as such, the game could only be run on

Macs with Mac OS X Jaguar or higher or on

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

powered Macs running

Mac OS X Tiger Mac OS X Tiger (version 10.4) is the 5th major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Mac computers. Tiger was released to the public on April 29, 2005, for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Inc ...

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Mac OS X Snow Leopard (version 10.6) (also referred to as OS X Snow Leopard) is the seventh major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Snow Leopard was publicly unveiled on June 8, 2009, at A ...

. Users are encouraged to burn the game onto

CDs CDS, CDs, Cds, etc. may refer to: Finance * Canadian Depository for Securities, Canadian post-trade financial services company * Certificate of deposit (CDs) * Counterfeit Deterrence System, developed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence ...

and distribute it to friends. Developed by the

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...

studio A studio is a space set aside for creative work of any kind, including art, dance, music and theater. The word ''studio'' is derived from the , from , from ''studere'', meaning to study or zeal. Types Art The studio of any artist, esp ...

Playerthree and the Italian company Deepend, the program uses

Macromedia Macromedia, Inc. was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Adobe Flash, Flash and Adobe Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its riv ...

for gameplay and

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

for video. The ''Food Force'' website also had lesson plans for teachers, reports on recent WFP work, a high score table and other features.

Legacy

''Food Force 2'', based on ''Food Force'', has been developed as

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

under the terms of version 3 of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. It is

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

as it is written in the

Python programming language Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Python is dynamically type-checked and garbage-collected. It supports multiple prog ...

, and runs on platforms including the One Laptop Per Child XO and the Sugar desktop environment. ''Food Force 2'' is available for download for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

References

External links

''Food Force'' official website

''Food Force'' official website (Latinamerican Edition)Worldview
A teacher's resource on the Food Force website
''Food Force - Bowl 2006''

''Food Force on OLPC''
*{{usurped,
''FoodForce2 site''
}
Friends of the World Food Program
United States agency helping raise funds and awareness about global hunger
World Food Program
UN Agency
''Pictures for truth''
A game for Amnesty International released in 2008
memellon
Developers of the Latinamerican Edition released in October 2008 2005 video games Advergames Classic Mac OS games Freeware games Helicopter video games Humanitarian video games Hunger relief Linux games Single-player video games Video games about food and drink Video games developed in Italy Video games developed in the United Kingdom Windows games