Latin America’s past relived in video game

Video games tend to fall into two categories: entertaining but violent or educational and boring. Tropical America belongs in neither genre.

In fact, it defies any easy classification.

A free, online game that takes players on a journey through 500 years of Latin American history, Tropical America was conceptualized and created by students at Belmont High School -- predominantly first-generation immigrants participating in an after-school program coordinated by two local groups, the nonprofit OnRamp Arts collective and the Urban Education Partnership.

On its surface, the game doesn’t sound especially fun. It begins with the 1981 El Mazote massacre in El Salvador -- a real-life battle in the Salvadoran civil war that left a single survivor, Rufina Maraya.

But the game is surprisingly engaging once players step into her shoes, moving through the action by choosing foods that send her on a variety of historical journeys.

Selecting sugar, for example, takes players to the Caribbean and an exploration of the slave trade; grapes lead to an investigation of the Spaniards’ arrival in the Americas.

“There was a profound sense of not understanding their own history, even the whole idea of why they spoke Spanish and not another language,” said Jessica Irish, the OnRamp board director who directed the project.

More than 90% of the students at Belmont High are Latino, she said. They come from a broad range of countries, including many in Central and South America.

Bringing their stories together, Tropical America has plenty of twists and turns to keep even avid gamers interested. Sometimes it is even humorous, as when a diseased rat sneaks onto a Spanish ship bound for the Americas, or when the player is dragged away to a torture chamber and the screen blacks out.

“Being a Latino here in the United States, there’s a common history that not a lot of people really know about,” said Juan Devis, the lead artist on the project.

“I thought it was important and necessary to sort of explore that and bring not only Mexico to L.A. but the entire Latin American history.”

It was this unusual take that attracted Andy Carvin to the project. A senior associate at the Benton Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank investigating strategies to bridge the digital divide, Carvin selected the Tropical America Web site to represent the United States in the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, which is taking place in Geneva. The site was one of eight selected to represent the U.S., and one of only five chosen to be on exhibit during the conference.

“Even though it’s not a multimillion-dollar Hollywood production by a team of expert programmers from Silicon Alley and New York, I felt Tropical America perfectly represented the spirit of the information society that so many of us are striving toward,” he said. “It demonstrates what can happen when you give young people who are often otherwise considered at risk or marginalized both the skills and the opportunity to create something for the greater community.

“The fact that they decided to create a game that not only incorporated Latin American history from an indigenous and Latino perspective but also incorporated the notion of human rights into a game, I found that to be very groundbreaking and unique.”

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Tropical America

What: Tropical America online video game

Where: www.tropicalamerica.com

Susan Carpenter can be reached at susan.carpenter@latimes.com