Have any of you ever played the game
3rd World Farmer? Its a little game someone made "to make you think". In it, you play a poor African family with a few bucks, a barren patch of land, and four options for what to grow (not counting livestock). Your goal is to get "educated", buy off a politician, make money, get a cell phone, and buy a bunch of machines and livestock.
And "make you think". Thats why they made the game. Want to know what I think?
What a f-ing joke.
I can't stand that game, even though I've played it all the way through a dozen times and feel dirty each time. The gamer in me can't stand leaving a challenge unbeaten; the rest of me just rankles at every disgusting assumption they make.
For starters, the paternalistic concept. "3rd World" is a BS term from the Cold War.
Its an anachronism. Calling a country "3rd World" is like calling the Czech Republic or Armenia the USSR. Its not accurate, and even back when they were a part of it, they didn't like it and would have rather NOT been called it.
It also implies that we in the "1st World" somehow know better. That because of our gaudy lifestyles, we're happier, or at least have a higher "standard of living".
The wh*** concept behind 3rd World Farmer is BS. We Westerners look at "poor" subsistence farmers and think we're so superior. Because we've figured out a trick of mother nature, how we can squeeze a few years of unbelievable crop yields out of genetically violated seeds grown with petrochemical fertilizers and systemic poisons. But at what cost? It murders the topsoil, mutilates the genetic biodiversity, and kills off birds, bees, and beneficial insects. We end up with weaker ecosystems, fewer farmers, less options in the store.
So instead of a game that implies the best thing farmers can do is imitate the dying breed of industrial farmers, why not create a game that rediscovers the way that people worked the land around the world in sustainable ways. How is it that the Chinampas and Milpas of Mexico were continuously cultivated for thousands of years with a diverse group of plants and never lost fertility? How were the Inca and Q'ero and Wari and Tiwanaku cultures able to feed more people with more variety of food 500 to 1000 years ago ON THE SAME LAND where they struggle to eke an existence out today with modern agricultural methods? How do rice paddies in China and Japan use closed loop, indigenous technology to stay productive year after year, century after century...?
What traditional crops are in danger of being lost as generations cut off from their ancestral wisdom opt to play the losing, insulting game of "3rd World Farmer", either in real life, or online?
We need a game that provides a real way to win, not just for the players, but for farmers worldwide.
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