With 30% of Americans now considered obese, many solutions are cropping up to try and address the issue.

One offered by ITVS Interactive and the PBS weekly series Independent Lens is the not-quite-PCishly titled Fatworld.

FATWORLD constructs a small-scale society in which players decide what to eat, how much to exercise, what foods should be sold and what regulations should be imposed to determine their own health and that of their community. The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition, obesity and social factors like budgets, the physical environment, food subsidies and government policy. FATWORLD is a game for adults and teens, but it can also serve as a starting point for discussions with children about nutrition, health and socioeconomics.

In the game, you get to create a character, select its starting weight and health conditions, and then select what the character will eat and how or it if will exercise. By tinkering with these two primary components of weight gain, players can see just how diet and exercise can add or take off the pounds.

“The main social change we’re interested in stimulating through the game is the idea that personal responsibility should not be the primary answer,” said FATWORLD lead designer and Persuasive Games co-founder Dr. Ian Bogost. “We need higher-order interventions, including certain regulations, to really change our collective well-being.”

The game also includes additional benefits, such as a real life recipe exchange and links to additional resources covering obesity, nutrition, exercise and food politics. FatWorld is available for both PC and Mac and requires an initial 14-20 MB download to play. FatWorld can be found at http://www.fatworld.org.

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