Discussion about entry: Freedom HIV/AIDS - Mobile Phone Games to create HIV/AIDS awareness in Asia and Africa

Thank you for your compelling entry, Mr. Quraishi. Your fundamental innovation seems a powerful one, and you appear to have succeeded in developing powerful partnerships with the mobile companies and funding organizations to have given you great reach.

My most pressing questions really concern results. While I appreciate your having told us that so many millions of people have downloaded your games, I'm keen to know what playing the game has taught players and how game play has altered their behavior or their thought. You refer, at some stage, as having achieved some "astonishing results" as a result of your first launch in Africa; might you share some of them? I'm particularly eager to know more about how your game has fared among the semi-literate populations in your target audience. Since your game-descriptions suggest to me that the most educative parts of your game are delivered in the form of printed text, I'm wondering how well (or how much) semi-literate audiences are able to learn from playing.

Also: in reading the literature you've included as attachments, I came across a sentence I don't understand. You say, in Press release- Mobile HIV Games africaf.pdf, that "The score of a gamer also enables to capture the learning quotient of the gamer thus helping in a behavior change". Can you please help me to understand what that means?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Diane
Changemakers

Thanks for your responses, Hilmi. I do hope you're intending to include (or attach) those notable results in (or to) your entry, as I'm sure they'll be of considerable interest to the judges.

Your responses prompt a few more questions and thoughts.

In reading your descriptions of the content of these games, it appeared to me that your game was delivering messages in sort of a compact form -- eg that AIDS can come from "unsafe sex" and that one should avoid "bad friends". I wonder: does each game also have a mechanism that unpacks those terms so that one can be confident that players know what "unsafe sex" is, or how bad friends can be a risk factor?

It's interesting that you've opted to use your audio messaging to deliver functional messages about the game (eg "game over") rather than to deliver health messages. Might not the audio messages be a powerful tool by which you could reach the semi-literate with your health messages? Or did your testing reveal the semi-literate to have learned/absorbed as many of your health messages as the literate?

I wonder whether you might not find a way of adding to your entry some clear way of explaining that an indication of the number of health messages a player has received is embedded in a player's score. Also, I wonder: do you have further testing planned to indicate how many of those messages have been absorbed, or are your Kibera and Mathare results measurements for those same games? (I hit the absorption/results drum so steadily only because I've spoken to several game designers who were disappointed to learn that some of their best players had learned to "game" the game; while they'd learned how to master game play -- and, as a result, were obtaining high scores -- they'd managed to avoid learning most or all of the messages that had been delivered alongside. Interestingly, they'd found that people who were much less successful at obtaining high scores had been considerably more successful at absorbing the game's messages. I wonder: have you seen or experienced anything similar with one or some of your games?)

Finally, as the entry we've been discussing concerns games delivered by mobile phones, we wonder whether the online game for young IT workers in India (that you attached for our perusal) might not be the basis for a second entry to the competition. After all, the entry we've been discussing concerns games distributed by mobile phones; as this is distributed online and playable on desktops, it might be sufficiently different to warrant a second entry. What do you think?

I'm interested in hearing your responses.

Best,
Diane
Changemakers

Using mobile phones, rather than web-based mediums, is critical to reaching your intended audience and demographic. Kudos to you for choosing the most appropriate game medium in India.

Adam Aberman
Director of Global Digital Strategy
Youth Venture and Ashoka's Youth Initiative

Dear Hilmi Sir,

This is a great achievement after winning the best CSR Award by GTZ and Teri this year. I wish ZMQ and its team load of success in all such activities in future. Keep it up!

Roshi