The National Geographic Kids Web site has rocketed into a new universe of gaming with the launch of “Pluto’s Secret,” a sophisticated, multi-level, online adventure game available now at http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/Games/ActionGames/Plutos-secret.
“Pluto’s Secret” joins hundreds of videos, interactive features, games, stories and recently launched blogs on the site, which was designated a 2008 Parents’ Choice Recommended award winner in August. All the content on www.nationalgeographic.com/kids is created specifically for kids and tied to the National Geographic mission of inspiring viewers to care about the planet.
“Pluto’s Secret,” geared for 8- to 14-year-olds, marks the debut of two animated characters named Nat and Geo (Nathan and Georgia) — young explorer friends who met in school and have become inseparable — and their monkey pal Gordo.
Nathan is a nature-lover. He loves ecology, trees, animals and everything that has to do with nature. Georgia is a science buff; she likes chemistry, physics and astronomy. Together, they travel across our solar system, solving missions that unlock information that will eventually reveal why Pluto is no longer considered a planet. Along they way, they must run planetary obstacle courses — running, jumping and manipulating gravity to avoid lava spouts, gas clouds and melting blocks of ice. On each planet, Nat and Geo meet a robot scientist who helps them get closer to answering the big question about Pluto. Players toggle between playing as the Nat and Geo characters, using each for their unique game-play abilities to complete game tasks quickly.
“This is a very immersive game with arcade- and console- quality graphics and environments,´ said Michelle Sullivan, executive producer of the National Geographic Kids Web site. “But we also designed the game to ignite the spark of learning in our growing online audience of kids who look to the NatGeo Kids’ Web site for in-school and after-school engagement.”
The site continues to add to its slate of new interactive features, including more games, videos and several kid-penned blogs. Year-to-date, unique visitors to www.nationalgeographic.com/kids are up 33 percent, according to internal Omniture statistics. Page views have grown by 68 percent in the same period.
To create “Pluto’s Secret,” National Geographic collaborated with Sarbakan (www.sarbakan.com), a leading casual game development studio based in Québec City, Canada. Over the last 10 years, Sarbakan has supplied a wide range of industries with cross-platform games and interactive content for clients such as Nickelodeon, Warner Bros, Hasbro, DaimlerChrysler, Viacom, Playfirst and RealArcade. In addition to providing clients with licensed game production services, Sarbakan also offers titles based on its own roster of intellectual properties, including past successful online products such as “Good Night Mr. Snoozleberg,” “Firechild,” “Arcane” and “Steppenwolf” and brand-new console titles like “Wordmaster” and the upcoming “Dig It Up.”
on October 5th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
This would be a much better game if you made the quest one to understand that there are two legitimate sides to the debate about Pluto’s planet status. I am very disappointed to see National Geographic blindly accept this controversial decision by four percent of the IAU, most of whom are not planetary scientists, a decision opposed in a petition of 300 professional astronomers who do still view Pluto as a planet. Why should children be exposed to only one view when this view is highly controversial and not accepted by many scientists? Those who oppose the IAU decision have a far better planet definition–a planet is any non-self-luminous spheroidal object orbiting a a star. If the object is spheroidal, that means it has enough self gravity to pull itself into a round shape (a condition known as hydrostatic equilibrium), which means it has differentiation and geological process akin to those of the major planets. This controversy could be easily resolved by a reversal of the IAU decree that dwarf planets are not planets at all. They are. While this game is undoubtedly educational, it sends the wrong message that Pluto’s supposed “non planet” status is a fact, when that is in fact far from being the case.
on October 5th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
This is a great point Laurel. I did not realize that Pluto’s status was so hotly contested. Given that, I agree with you that they could have made the game better by presenting it as a way to explore and understand both sides of this.
on October 5th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Don, thank you for recognizing this. Here are two sites illustrating the ongoing opposition to Pluto’s demotion:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/planetprotest/ Petition of 300 astronomers, led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, opposing the 2006 IAU planet definition and subsequent demotion of Pluto.
http://gpd.jhuapl.edu/ Video and Audio transcripts of a conference I attended at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory two months ago, titled “The Great Planet Debate.”