JDBASKETBALL

Congratulations! Very cool, innovative!

I work throughout India promoting basketball thru social programs? I was recently asked to do some AIDS awareness project with the US State Dept. in Mumbai.

Possibly as a distribution source, or on separate project basis, please let me know what you think?

JD Walsh

www.jdbasketball.com
+1 917.345.9129
jdwalsh242skype.com

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

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

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

Hi Diane,

Greetings from India! Thanks for your response. We are doing our every bit to take the initiative to the grass-root level.

Find below answers to your queries:

1. Playing the games, people have learnt about basics of HIV/AIDS, transmission, prevention, myths and misconceptions, stigma and discrimination. After the first launch in Nairobi, we had field tests in the 2 major slums of the city, namely Kibera and Mathare. The game score of people was high, they quickly learned to play the games and were able to recollect around 60-65% of the messaging delivered during the game play. The results both in India and Africa have shown that download numbers in small towns and slums were higher in percentage than in bigger town and cities. These results were astonishing for us. We believe that in places where there is lack of other modes of entertainment, people played these games more than others.
The interest, the number of download, and retention of information was very high, this was indeed astonishing for us.

2. The games have 3 modes of messaging, Textual, Iconic messaging and Audio messages. The Audio messages are delivered on screens like Lost life, Next level, Pause Screens, Game Over ...

3. I apologies for the phrase in the press release for not being self-explanatory. Actually it meant that the score of a gamer describes about the number of messages he gets, which in turn helps in calculating his learning index. For example, a gamer who scores 200 points and moves from level 1 to level 2, gets in the process gets 20 messages on HIV prevention or basics, 10 on Myths and Misconceptions, and if he has lost 2 lives in doing so, that implies he has received 2 messages on Transmission or Stigma. Hence all scores, level history can describe actual learning delivered. A Game’s learning index is set as 1 (on a scale of 0-1, which is in total 300 different learning messages). If a Gamer gets 30 messages during game play, his learning is 0,1.
After completing 10 game sessions, a user has to answer 5 basic behavioral questions related to his learning. This provides the BC information. The calculation is a bit more complex than, I have explained, there are other factors also considered in BC calculation.

I hope :), I have explained it clearly enough.
Also, for your perusal, here is one of our latest games developed on HIV/AIDS awareness for young IT workers of India. It is a simple desktop game. You can download it from: Download the package from: www.zmq.in/HIV_game_SETUP.zip.

Thanks
Hilmi

Hilmi Quraishi

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