Bulletin

Issue: August 2004

News

Computer game to reach homeless

Street kids may soon be able to play a vividly 'real' computer game that mirrors their own experiences. By developing their game play skills and 'survival smarts', players are able to steer the main game character through a simulation of life on the streets.

The game is being developed with the assistance of a number of organisations including La Trobe University's Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

Called Street Survivor, it is a third person adventure combat game for the PC that thrusts players into the role of 'Sonya', a recently homeless teenager, who spirals into a cycle of addiction, hunger, violence and crime as she flees from her past and searches for another kind of future.

La Trobe's Dr Richard Hall, a specialist in computational story models, says Sonya is not a victim or a fool, and her adventures are not portrayed in a moralising way. Underlying the action and excitement of the game is the message that there are services available for young people on the streets; that there is useful information out there and that there are people around who can help.

It is hoped that the target audience - young people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness - can be reached through the installation of the game in frontline youth service agencies around Australia.

Dr Hall became involved in the project when met young film director, Kirsty Baird, at the Independent Game Developers Conference at the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne in May this year.

In early 2002 Ms Baird worked on a national film project in which filmmakers were matched up with young people who were or had been homeless, or at risk of homelessness, to make films about their experiences and to help them to tell their stories.

She helped write and direct one of those films, called Street Survivor in which a girl spirals into, and becomes trapped in, a video game. The idea of making a video game which could inform at-risk young people developed from there.

In late 2003, the research and development of Street Survivor was funded by both the City of Melbourne's Community Cultural Development Program and the Interactive Media Fund at the Australian Film Commission. A small team was assembled with Ms Baird as writer, director and project manager;

The team established the look and feel of the game. Dr Hall began work with Ms Baird to develop these ideas and various aspects of homelessness, such as living in squats and meeting drug dealers, into game play and game narratives.

'My role is to turn Kirsty's ideas about the sorts of messages she wants to get across into a game design,' says Dr Hall.

Ms Baird concludes: 'Our aim is not to offer easy answers but to provide opportunities for the player to make a range of choices under pressure.'

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