This one sounds pretty interesting to me, I'll check it out...

Cool. If you get a copy, share your thoughts with us here...

First impressions from free 14 day trial:

Wow, what a jolt I felt when my 14 year old character (avatar? replican? sim? none of the words work here) died of a mosquito-bourne illness just after starting to date.

It contains HUGE amounts of information, this is just almost an amazing experience, yet...

Because there is no graphical representaion of your person, and your interation is limited to pressing the "Age a Year" button (at least for the first 18 years), this cannot possibly be truly immersive to its target market - school aged kids raised on graphical video games.

It is tantalizingly close, however, has all the great bones of a solid, meaningful tool for breaking down the "Us and Them" walls but the interface is off-putting. Information is conveyed through the use of standard windows, rather than say, from a newscaster or newpaper headline, or even "Your mother tells you...". This points out, however, the great problem in asking you to be an infant, or an illiterate...you must constantly break character to proceed.

Still, it was surprising how strong my urge was to scream "Stop having babies!" to my impoverished, starving, yet extremely fertile young parents.

This, this sort of thing someday blended with the immerssiveness of an EQ- type virtual space, will provide a very powerful place to experience a degree of empathy and policy exploration in way far more personally than zoning in SimCity.

I got the 14 day trial as well. I've played two games.

In the frist, Song Shi-k'ai lived 21 years before randomly dying of colon cancer. Among other things, he had served in the military and cleaned up someone else's mess.

In the second, Lotte Morgenthau (née Strauss) died of breast cancer at 49. She left behind a husband, Karsten (50) and a son, Fritz (13). Lotte's familiy managed to amass a respectable 225,000 euros before she died.

Before I start complaining, I should mention that this is really quite a good game and I feel compelled to play it more.

Real Life 2004 is a Win32 application -- you spend most of your time clicking OK in dialog boxes. The main screen is a map that doesn't seem to serve enough purpose to demand such real estate; I would have rather had more ready access to my Relationship, Expense, and Investment panels.

There are some annoying details, such as the inability to reinvest money automatically, but the main flaw I found in the game was that I had no sense that the decisions I made balanced or unbalanced my character. For example, with a rating of 13% Lotte was apparently quite unattractive; she had a hard time finding a boyfriend. However, even after she saught and was rejected from a dozen relationships in one turn (year), her happines rating remained the same.

Moreover, Lotte's case of breast cancer seemed completely uncorrelated with the rest of her life decisions. Shi-k'ai's colon cancer appeared with no warning and killed him within the year.

In my opinion, the game's graphical poverty is less a flaw than its strategic poverty; Next I'm going to try designing a character to see if I can get a richer experience.

As an educational tool, the product is probably successful just by introducing players to the variety of peoples, opportunities, and challenges in the world. Bridget makes the excellent point that the game's strength is in its ability to create empathy.

So, here's my question: does a player have a Martin Buber style "thou" experience with their Real Life 2004 character? What about their Sim?

I found this interesting enough to play Piaget and watch my two sons run though this experience. At just under 11 and 13.5, I am thinking that they are somewhere close to the target market.

10 year old was unenthusiastic about playing, but quickly became immersed in the character and used "I" in all his descriptions. His primary concern was keeping his happiness stat as high as he could and was frustrated that he couldn't quite seem to affect it directly. Not once did he look at the countrywide stats on the top tabs (which really are presented as cryptically as possible). He reacted emotionally to every bit of personal news and did read most all of the other data presented during turns. The occaisonal ethical dilemma was presented without enough specifics to make the situations real to him. He was stunned though, upon being arrested and tortured for his social activism. His biggest response, overall, was figuring out what his girlfriend Tan Shi-ting would be called if you removed the dash in her name. I admit I giggled too.

Now, the 13 year old flew through the non-character info and focussed almost entirely on making the right investment decisions. He got bored pretty quickly with the repetitive and somewhat irrelevent "Your sister's boyfriend graduated from secondary school" and "You family was not affected by the disaster" messages.

10 year old, though, saved his char and went back in time, a la Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, to see how long he could keep him alive in an alternate life. He has also gone back a number of times making a "good" character - a custom designed American with max stats who goes to college and gets a good job. Ahem.

Both of them rerolled all their char at creation until they got boys.

All that said, I think it is a good start. It would be something to see it filled our, perhaps with a racially and gender approiate face that ages slowly, or a slideshow of photos related to the news bits you are presented.

As an educational tool, I think that is is pretty "sound-bitey" but could lead to some fine coversation and writing if integrated into a longer course of study of that region. Your character's "life" would be a great jumping off point for a "bio" of a resident in , say, a world history or social studies course.Sitting beside my younger son led to some very good discussions about moral choices, and about the lack of clean water and sanitation in so much of the world.

It is reasonably priced and it would be interesting to see the teaching aids that are available.

Got to clean up those bugs though. I lost a child through one. Ack!

Bridget> Sitting beside my younger son led to some very good discussions about moral choices, and about the lack of clean water and sanitation in so much of the world.

This is a really important point. Parents need to play games with their kids in general, but games like this benefit especially from parental mediation. That said, I think the problems of immediate causality and logical consistency might still make it hard. I should look and see if the developer published a teachers guide. It would be interesting to see what they put in there.

Ian, I read in the April 26, 2004 San Jose Mercury News that a teacher edition is offered for this game -- it costs about $20 more than the regular version.

I played this game and found it a neat idea with a million possibilities. Graphics would be nice, even if they were just photos. The useless information like "your brothers girlfriends aunt died" should go away, they are useless. Everyone above covered what I could write here. Neat game tho!