There's something awfully proxy

about going on these game sites. Even the educational ones. Today I went to Whyville, a nice enough children's game site. You take tours and they don't condescend to children and you're spoken to in captions whose delivery is still flatter than comics. Comics whose lack of motion somehow causes your mind to envision more motion and emoting than the simulated stuff. The maturity of the dialog with your virtual counterparts and characters as well as some of the topics are instructive. So if you're going to play you'll get some learning out of it, but many games seem like neither fish nor fowl, not real but not fantastic enough. Panwapa impressed me but it was done by Sesame Street with decent audio and has accompanying videos. It's interactive so you engage, but it just seems to be pleasantly retrofitting a good old didactic edu tv or film program. Some interesting educational potential though. Lastly, the most effective I saw was Darfur is Dying: interactive animation to take you through the horrors of those everyday people (you play one of them) in the crossfire of war, the winners being the Darfur'ns whom you can donate to online when you're good and sickened by the discreet atrocities; as if to say "and you thought gaming was only for fun, conquests, virtual money, and knocking stuff over for points". I couldn't have said it better myself. I've got to think this medium over.