Sands of Silence

Draxtor Despres talks to Spanish-American documentarian Chelo Alvarez-Stehle about her project on sex-trafficking, called "Sands Of Silence", which will be accompanied by a flash-based game.

Projects like this allow me to see the potential that games have to teach people about the world around them. In Randy Pausch's lecture about achieving childhood dreams, he talked about how people can be tricked into learning. Obviously, when learning becomes fun, information is absorbed much more effortlessly. Shouldn't learning be like this anyways? It shouldn't have to become a chore.

When I was doing a search for this game, I came across a blog post written by a youth organizer who was trying to get together a global collective of undocumented youth bloggers. The blogger was concerned about who exactly would use the game and whether it could be marketed. The blogger also said...


"...if we cannot truly help, inspire and activate the ‘subjects’ of the gameplay, we aren’t really succeeding in creating a successful game, all things considered."

However, I can't say that I agree. Just because someone doesn't turn around and become an activist working to stop sex-trafficking, does not mean that the game is not helping in some way. The game allows seeds of knowledge to be planted that may help shape the player's worldview. We cannot track exactly what may come of this. But, I'm sure that what will come of it is more than would come of a child/teen etc. sitting in front of a computer all day playing shoot-em up games that are based on pure fantasy.

SOS_Slaves Game