I came across a game developed with and for Amnesty International, called "Pictures for truth".

About the project: "This game was developed to support Amnesty International's campaign on China. The story and characters represented are fictional. The aim of this project is to sensitize the player to human rights violations"

About the game: "You are a journalist and photographer. A few months before the Beijing Olympic Games, your best friend, Jun Shen, a human rights defender and journalist, calls for help. You will do everything you can to help him. This adventure will take you to China where you will be confronted to many human rights violations.  By investigating, taking pictures and publishing your articles, you will work to solve the problems you encounter and eventually save your friend!"

Anyway... I played with the game for about an hour until I finished the game (Its a short game) with a score of 4000 fame points (Hurray!) and I must say that I liked it, It brought me back to the good old days of playing simple quests. But this is obviously not a game for gamers, its a very creative way to spread the amnesty agenda. And a good work doing so in this way, it really brought it to my attention.

In terms of usability the game is pretty intuitive, and I have just one main remark - It was really hard to learn how to start playing... Why?

This is the first screen you encounter after you load the game

Good idea to show me the game instruction before i play, but i kept looking and looking for the Start playing button, and couldn't find him. I just didn't know how to start the game. After a lot of air-clicking I pressed the instructions button F1 and the instruction disappeared and I could play the game. From my subjective view, this was not so intuitive... so please add a Close/Start/Play button instead of making us try and understand that this is not a pre-game screen, and just a layer of the instructions already opened...

Other than that, and on an ethic level something really bothered me

During the game you need to take pictures of "events" in order to publish articles (each article gives you more fame points). If you manage to get a better picture that shows things in different angels, for examples a bigger focus on the big bad Chinese police and in the background its prisoner, you gain more fame points then just a simple picture of both of them.

What is my problem?

• First, the game objective is to gain "Fame" points by revealing the truth and exposing the real deal. Do Amnesty people do it for the sake of fame?
• Second, the game enforces the art of taking the right picture? Do Amnesty encourage people touch up the pictures so that they will be more effective?

These things make me think a lot about the objectivity in reports, The entire conception looks a bit rotten, But the game is pretty cool, and it does deliver an important message, so go play it.