Booze Cruise deservs and F-

Pacey says:

I'm watching the national news, and a story is run regarding a video game developed by the University of Calgary Fine Arts Department to, I think, to deter kids from drinking and driving. The goal of the game is drive home drunk safely.

I'll let that sink in.

Now, albeit for me to defend drunk driving. Drinking and driving is an awful pr... blah be blah blah blergh. That aside, I cannot for the life of me understand why such a bone-headed video game gets praise worthy of national news coverage. This kind of thing should be subject to ridicule.

Here's the plot: in the game, the player has a blood alcohol level of 0.25 and tries to drive home. The player drives the car, but the car doesn't respond to key-commands appropriately, in an attempt to illustrate the decreased co-ordination and reaction time of the impaired driver. Other cars, police, pedestrians, etc are everywhere and the driver making collisions and arrests likely.

Why would a respected news agency validate such buffoonery? For that matter, why would a University?

The problems with this game should be obvious. One of the most glaring has to be that the children playing the game will want to get good at driving drunk. If they start 'winning' by getting good at driving drunk, it defeats the purpose of the game. If they cannot 'win' or otherwise improve, they will not play it, defeating the purpose of the game. Way to think it through, Fine Arts Department.

This news story is the culmination of a number of myths, including one where anything that spills out of a University is uncritically deemed worthy, where anything that combats drunk driving worthy, and where news agencies impede the perpetuation of nonsense.

You can read and watch the segment here:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071007/booze_cruise_071007/20071007?hub=CTVNewsAt11

Any effort using Google will turn up Dr. James Parker, who lead the project:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~jparker/cv.html

... and his well thought out religious beliefs which led him to be a Quaker:
http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~parker/religion.html