My Animal Centre

Tyler: "What did you want to be, Raymond?"

Raymond: "Veterinarian! Animals and stuff!"

Tyler: "If you're not on your way to becoming a vet in 30 days, you will be dead."

—Fight Club

No sooner did I meet a young woman on the bus who was aspiring to become a veterinarian than I came across a new game called My Animal Centre, a veterinarian game for Nintendo Wii and DS.

I'm not the "target demographic" for a pink game about ponies, but I wouldn't let marketing demographics stop me from playing "boy games" if I were a girl and I would certainly give this a try if I had a Wii and was interested in veterinarian medicine.

I'm mostly interested in empowering games that teach real-world skills. Although many games in this emerging category like Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney are more akin to interactive TV drama than cramming aids for law school exams, they are still inspiring ways to have fun while learning about actually viable life paths. For some reason I think young gamers have a better shot at becoming veterinarians than Blood Elf Shamans, no matter how good their Guild connections might be.

My Animal Centre is also developed using the Unity game engine so an iPhone version should be possible as well. I heard about it via an Ars Technica article about Mono being used for iPhone game development using Unity.