“He said playing it made him sad.” Susana Ruiz there, speaking about her 9-year-old nephew. Ruiz is the project leader of the USC team that designed the online game Darfur Is Dying sponsored by MTVu in partnership with the Reebok Human Rights Foundation.

So in 2006 the Reebok-sponsored website MTVu decided it would go further than most sportswear companies in deciding who to ask to be their current celebrity endorser. They decided on a game that millions have played before: the ‘game’ of war. And the celebrity in question? None other than the glamour-intensive area in Africa’s largest country by square mile, known as Darfur. At the time, South Sudan was but a hope in the eyes of South Sudanese. It was also ground zero for celebrity self-aggrandizement. People from the vapid world of Hollywood who were looking for ‘the real’ had searched high and low. And they found it in abundance in the deadly and chaotic situation that was Darfur. We all know about George Clooney’s involvement, but there were others, including Ryan Gosling, who made ‘Darfur’ and ‘Save Darfur’ t-shirts into one of those dubious celebrity fashion statements.

But this game, this game I have only just heard of as an African, after apparently over a million people have played to get ‘narrative-based stimulation’ makes me equally, if not more, sick. It’s almost as if each game played was supposed to signify a death, or displacement. As I had to ask my friend, you need a game to have empathy for other people? And college students need a game to stimulate conversation about a region that probably has its own encyclopaedic volume by now. It boggles the mind that people’s suffering can be so charmingly distilled into an easily accessible ‘teachable moment’ in game format. We doubt this was the intent, but the critics of the game are not far off when they say they “have noted that despite the number of players, the actual crisis was unaffected, and the sole outcome of the game was to give publicity to the game’s creators.” Yikes. Sounds like George Clooney. I think we need to see a Borat sketch on this game. Which game do you want Ryan, Dar-Four or Dar-Five?

H/T: Kate Bomz