One Little Game About Peace
by Michael HoffmanTuesday, February 12th, 2008
The Make Your Media Matter conference put on by the Center for Social Media at American University was a great success last week. We co-hosted the reception on Thursday night and there was a great turn-out and great energy at the conference.
One of the most interesting discussions this year was about gaming. Games have come to rival (or exceed) Hollywood in terms of dollars. Gaming is huge. From the console games played on those Playstation, Wii, and XBoxes, to what are called “causal games” like online Scrabble or what you have at the cool website Free Rice.
On the gaming panel was Eric Brown, the CEO of ImpactGames. ImpactGames is the publisher of PeaceMaker, a game where you can make peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The game started as a project of Eric Brown and co-founder Asi Burak as part of their program in Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. They are now working on some new games that are very interesting.
One of their games is called Play The News, and it basically has the player learn about a current news event, put themselves in the shoes of one of the parties in the news event, and then predict what will happen in real life. A kind of companion social network then tracks and rates how the people did in predicting the outcomes.
The thing about games is that it requires the player to make decisions. And by making decisions you can feel empathy for the people in whose shoes you are walking. You can also see the consequences of decisions that might seem obvious on first blush, but that have more complicated implications.
The whole world of “Games for Change” is growing rapidly. There is an annual conference that’s gotten huge and a lot of nonprofits are wondering how they can harness the power of gaming to promote their work and their issues.
Here’s some background on PeaceMaker:
