Not the Usual Game Application

In the nascent space of serious games, one of the biggest successes has been a project called Darfur Is Dying, which has been played online at least 1 million times.

Designed by Susana Ruiz, then a grad student, the title lets players take on the roles of members of a refugee family as they fight to survive, foraging for water while avoiding gun-toting militia members.

Her latest project involves a game and a documentary focused on a set of murders in Tennessee in 1997. Ruiz and her filmmaker partner, Ashley York, hope to explain to players some of the complexities of the U.S. legal system and give a glimpse of what prison life is like.

Ruiz said the game format has an advantage over film in some ways because she can take advantage of a player's perch in front of the computer screen to present documents that might be too lengthy to examine in the context of a film.

She also said they think the game format will allow them to reach a wider crowd than the audiences that typically show up to see a documentary at a film festival.

That's the hope with all of these projects, of course -- to reach young people who spend more time in front of computer screens than they might spend with a book.

Speaking at a recent Games for Change event in New York, O'Connor said she was as surprised as anybody that she was spending her retirement thinking about computer games. Although she's not a fan of them, she came to see their importance in the daily lives of young people such as her grandchildren.

"We need to impart what we know by using the medium which they know" she said. The project is scheduled to be playable online, at a site called Our Courts ( www.ourcourts.org), next year.