Perfect World by BreakAway Games: a water cycle game for schools

Perfect World casts the player as a water molecule. The student moves that character around the world, visiting locations where water is found. Movement works with action cards: a player uses a card to travel along a path from one location to another and earns new cards by answering questions.

BreakAway Games, a serious games developer, designed and built it for the Baltimore County Public School System as part of its water sciences curriculum, including Standard, Honors, GT and AP courses. BreakAway's own case study says the game helps students understand meteorological terms and concepts that are hard to explain through classroom instruction.

The game grew out of the district's student programs. Baltimore County Public Schools runs the BCPS L.i.V.E. program, in which student teams compete to develop software games that put parts of the curriculum into play. Perfect World began with a 2010 idea from Rufus Carter and a co-creator, then students at Woodlawn High School.

Perfect World was selected as a finalist in the Business category of the 2013 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge, one of its seven award categories, at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida, from December 2 to 5, 2013. The finalists for that year were announced in October 2013, ahead of the conference. BreakAway lists the finalist placement on its awards page next to its 2012 Serious Play Awards silver medal for Vision. The full 2013 field is on the 2013 contest page.

The game targets the STEM needs of students in science courses and draws on topics from the biology, earth and space science and environmental science curricula. Players can visit every water cycle location only after they have built knowledge pathways between them.

BreakAway Games is still active, and its website is online. Its Perfect World case study describes the game, but no page found offers it for play. The older games address for Perfect World on the site forwards to the case study.

BreakAway's homepage now invites visitors to play its medical and nursing games on the vHealthCare Portal. As of November 2026 the status of Perfect World is listed as unconfirmed, because the only official page is a description.