A team of students at Dalhousie University have created a video game that will be used to help train peacekeepers on how to interact with child soldiers.
The game was developed for the Romeo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative (RDCSI), which is based out of the political science department at Dalhousie.
According to Josh Boyter, the communications officer at the RDCSI, the game simulates the various scenarios peacekeepers may face. They range from low-risk interactions such as encountering a delinquent child, to a high-risk situation where a child is being used as a suicide bomber.
Users have to work their way through a series of interactions with child soldiers, making choices along the way with varying results.
“We want people to actually act out these scenarios because it’s not like they’re going to be able to refer to a book when they are facing a child soldier,” Boyter said. “They have to have that kind of muscle memory already built in. So what this allows them to do is really kind of walk through the scenarios in a context specific way.”
While the RDCSI provided the initial idea for the game, 11 computer science students at Dalhousie did the coding and design throughout 2015.
Third-year Dalhousie computer science student Alex Kulakevich helped create the instructions that dictate what happens in the game. Working on the project allowed him to not only gain hands-on experience in game development, but also taught him a lot about child soldiers, he said.
“It seems like it’s hard to see how they suffer and how cruel the world can be, but if you actually live there you would understand,” Kulakevich said. “And this is what the game is supposed to do, it’s supposed to give you a quick overview of what could actually happen there if you were ever to see a child soldier.”
Initially, the video game was designed as a means of helping the public understand the split-second decisions peacekeepers make in the field when they encounter a child soldier.
However, the initiative realized the game represented an effective way of enhancing its training program with an interactive training tool.
“It gets [peacekeepers] that context that is absolutely essential in terms of being able to effectively undertake their mission and really play a role in ending the use and recruitment of child soldiers,” he said.
RDCSI was founded in 2007 by former general Romeo Dallaire, who had served in Rwanda during its genocide, in the hopes of ending the use and recruitment of child soldiers.
The initiative focuses its efforts on research, advocacy work and training security actors such as peacekeepers and military personnel who often represent the first point of contact with child soldiers.
“The hope is, through engaging with the security sector, we can develop a holistic approach and compliment the larger international efforts to end the use of child soldiers,” Boyter said.
According to War Child International, there are an estimated 250,000 child soldiers in the world today.
A 2014 United Nations report on children and armed conflict found that seven national armies and 50 armed groups currently recruit children in 14 countries around the world. This includes countries such as the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Syria.
