MIL goes viral: The Guatemalan game app Tinamit | Latin America | DW | 01.03.2023
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Latin America

MIL goes viral: The Guatemalan game app Tinamit

Can it take a village for youth to have fun learning Media and Information Literacy? The Guatemalan organization Comunicares says it can and has developed a successful interactive app.

How do you teach young people the basics of dealing critically with the media and disinformation? DW Akademie’s Guatemalan partner organization Comunicares took the challenge and developed a role-playing game based on the everyday lives of young indigenous people. The app is called "Tinamit", a word meaning "village" in many Mayan languages, and includes the abbreviation "AMI", the Spanish term for Media and Information Literacy (MIL).

The game is set in a village where young players dive into the world of five young Guatemalan protagonists. Players have to make decisions about daily situations, and these decisions determine how the game proceeds. One question, for example, is how to deal with unserious job or training offers in the capital or abroad that appear on WhatsApp.

The players interact and based on their talks with the other protagonists, decide their next move.

The MIL game Tinamit was developed as part of the Global Crisis Initiative project "MIL goes viral". The game concept emerged from a Comunicares study that reflects how young people with limited Internet access deal with information and also use Mayan languages on social media.

Several young people from four Mayan communities helped develop the app, with the game’s four protagonists and the village itself based on their own experiences. Truly reflecting Guatemalan culture and how information is shared in villages, the game challenges young players to make critical decisions themselves. The app is now a standard component of Comunicares’ MIL training programs.

You can play the game HERE (in Spanisch).