From mtvU (MTV's college network) comes Darfur is Dying, an inherently depressing game that wears its social and moral conscience on its sleeve. This Internet, flash-based game wants to awaken you to the horrors of the conflict in Sudan by having you play the role of a child refugee. The game consists of two parts: The first part requires you to run around a depressing desert landscape to collect water from the well and return to the refugee camp while hiding to avoid the roaming Janjaweed militia. If caught, your character is killed, raped, or abducted, although mercifully, your fate is related in text only. This part of the game is rather simple, but the controls are somewhat difficult to get used to; you keep moving in the direction of the arrow key pressed until you hit another arrow-key or the space bar to hide, instead of only moving when you hold the key down as in most other games. Also, your distance to the pump is shown by number of meters, instead of graphically. The game?s second part is an isometric projection of the refugee camp where your character is stuck, and must run around distributing water in order to grow food and make bricks to build structures. Question marks scattered throughout the camp have nothing to do with game play, clicking them gives you either information about refugee life, or horrific stories of fellow refugees.

When the camp runs out of water, you have to exit the camp and go back to the first part of the game to get some more. Each time you gather water, another day passes. The goal is to keep the camp functioning for seven days. This is made difficult by random Janjaweed militia attacks (which are not actually shown) which destroy buildings and crops that you have to work to replace. Each attack gives you an opportunity to click on a button to donate, learn more about the Darfur situation, or email President Obama. This has been updated from President Bush, so it's good to know that the creators haven't abandoned the game since it was launched in 2006. However, they haven't made some needed changes.

While the game's cause is untouchable, the game play is merely adequate. The graphics and game play of the camp don't quite match up, so your character keeps running into invisible walls and walking right through visible ones in the camp while trying to deliver water. There are a couple of question marks in the camp that aren't clickable. The random militia attacks would have greater impact on the user if there was some visual element to them, instead of just a text announcement, and then the food and water meters going down. There are a few misspellings in the game text, and the directions need more detail on the actual game play.

The website outlines two more proposed levels in the game, but they have not yet materialized, and the links to download the beta versions of them are broken. In one level you are a UN worker distributing food while trying to keep warring tribes apart, and another level where you try to sneak into the Janjaweed warehouse and drain their fuel tanks.