ImpactGames Blog Author Archive
I wanted to write to our community to update you all about a significant event for ImpactGames.
We have recently sold our award-winning PeaceMaker and Play the News platforms to Hybrid Learning Systems. They have also taken over the ImpactGames brand so that our products could enjoy a seamless transition into their company.
This is a bitter-sweet moment for us as a company as we were not able to maintain the necessary resources to see our vision through. However, on the positive side we believe we created products with meaning and value that found a good home for their future.
Hybrid Learning Systems has both the resources to carry on where we left off and new skills that will take them beyond. They share our vision and mission for the possibilities that our work represents and are committed to taking them to new places.
While ImpactGames in its current form is not moving on, as many of you know our co-founder Asi Burak has since become the Co-President of Games4Change, I am happy to announce that I have accepted a position with Hybrid Learning Systems.
Feel free to visit this link for the formal announcement about the acquisition: Press Release
And with that I would like to introduce to you Kris Rockwell CEO of Hybrid Learning Systems who wanted to add a few words to this post. I am sure you will be seeing more from him in the future.
Eric Brown
CVO, ImpactGames
Kris Rockwell’s words:
“The acquisition of the ImpactGames assets was unexpected but very welcome. Peacemaker alone is an important game covering a very delicate issue and both Eric and Asi have created an amazing work that more that speaks for itself.
Undoubtedly we have some very big shoes to fill. It is our intention to continue to grow the Peacemaker platform and continue to support its existing user base. We are very honored and excited to be a part of this process.
We are very pleased that Eric has agreed to join us as Chief Visionary Officer of ImpactGames. His vision, experience and remarkable talent will help us continue to grow and keep on the path that he has set with his work.
I am very pleased to be working with Eric and look forward to growing ImpactGames while continuing to keep it on the path of socially responsible gaming. It’s very exciting to keep such an important effort in the Pittsburgh area and I look forward to talking with the existing user community over the next few months.”
Sincerely,
Kris Rockwell
CEO, ImpactGames
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I am writing to announce the launch of a PeaceMaker Educator Forum. We have now had over 2 years of teachers and students playing PeaceMaker. Over these 2 years we have had many inquiries from teachers, researchers, and even prestigious press organizations as to how the use of PeaceMaker has contributed to classroom and out of classroom learning. Who better to answer these questions then those of you who are teachers and students.
We would be very grateful if you could quickly answer the following relevant survey. I promise you that it is a very short survey and will only take a couple moments of your time.
Educator Survey
Student Survey
The goal of this outreach is to create a central repository and community where you can share with each other all of the different ways that PeaceMaker can be used to enrich learning and community initiatives, provide testimonials to promote the use of PeaceMaker in and out of the classroom, and create a list of individuals that are willing to be contacted by peers and press. We would love for you to visit the Forum at forum(dot)impactgames(dot)com (sorry for not hyperlinking it but it has started to be apammed), and even better to contribute your own testimonials and lesson plans for others to learn from.
We greatly appreciate your continued support.
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We have recently outlined two new projects that ImpactGames would love to pursue. Based on multiple discussions we have had with leaders in the educational space and our own internal experience with creating content for both ourselves and clients we feel there is a timely and genuine potential for the use of our Play the News Platform as a teaching and training tool. We welcome you to review the following proposals:
(1) Play the News in the classroom (K-12) – A proposal that focuses on the creation of educational modules for a range of subjects:
http://download.peacemakergame.com/ImpactGames_Educational_Proposal.pdf
(2) Play the News to teach new media journalism – A proposal that focuses on teaching new forms of journalism and discussing the future of interactive journalism:
http://download.peacemakergame.com/IG_Journalism_Ed_Proposal.pdf
As always we are continuing our discussions with media outlets and content providers that are looking to broaden their digital and community offerings. You can view our media partner presentation here:
http://download.peacemakergame.com/ImpactGamesMedia.pdf
We are also open to other creative applications and ideas on how our work can be integrated with other efforts. We hope that these proposals will serve as a starting point for discussions.
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We are excited to announce that PeaceMaker, our first game, was selected as a finalist in the prestigious contest INDEX: Design to Improve Life.
The INDEX organization was founded by the Danish Government under the patronage of HRH The Crown Prince and is regarded as one of the biggest design awards in the world. Kigge Hvid, CEO of INDEX: explains, “INDEX:’s mission is to ensure more Design to Improve Life of higher quality in the world. Therefore we inspire, collect, advocate, communicate, evaluate, connect and discuss Design to Improve Life globally.”
The finalist’s works will be presented in a touring exhibition that premieres in August 2009 in Copenhagen and travels throughout Denmark and Internationally. The award is given to winners in five categories – Body, Home, Work, Play and Community (all to be announced August 28). Among other finalists in the Play category are Nike Trash Talk, City Invader and the Recycle Factory. You can view all of the finalists here.
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We are very honored that Play The News won the First Knight News Game Award. The winner was announced at the Games for Change Annual Festival last week. According to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation the award “honors the best of this exciting new genre: games which are journalistic and strengthen people’s ability to make decisions in a democracy.” You can read the full press release here.
We really hope that this great recognition will support our current effort in finding new educational partners and venues for the use of the platform. The other finalists who were honored at the event are the Budget Maze by the Gotham Gazette, Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City by Global Kids and September 12th, the iconic news game created by Gonzalo Frasca and his team that many attribute to coining the phrase “newsgaming”.
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In answer to many people’s comments and support issues we are pleased to provide our customers with this new functionality. The patch below will work for anyone purchasing a copy of PeaceMaker that does not already have integrated this new functionality. We understand everyones desire to be able to have flexibility with software they purchase and we are glad to finally provide that. This should also make it easier for educational institutions that are continuously re-imaging their computer labs.
New Patch: Deactivation and Reactivation Functionality
We have recently added new functionality to allow our users to deactivate and reactivate copies of PeaceMaker in order to move them from computer to computer. Please be sure to use the deactivation tool before uninstalling. If you own the online version (v1.068 and earlier) or the CD version (physical copy) feel free to install this patch for PC or Mac. You do not need this patch if you own a later version of PeaceMaker. DO NOT use this patch if you have the Peres Center version.
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Dear Play the News Community,
On behalf of ImpactGames we would like to thank you all for your participation in our Beta community. We have reached a point in the progression of this product where we will be ceasing to produce new content for the site. We will not be opening, locking, or closing any of the current content. For now we will be leaving the site frozen in time for demonstration purposes and to support our fundraising, content partner acquisition, and future development needs.
In the last few months we have created 126 games on a wide range of subject matter. The process has educated us personally, and hopefully those of you in our community, on many issues. Some of the games we created were on issues we read about every day, while some were on meaningful subjects that are generally buried in the margins of the mainstream press. The discussions around the games have been very thoughtful and revealing to us as developers and individuals. We believe that the way we have packaged current events represents a fresh way for people to consume headline news, and provides greater context and engagement on complex issues and even lighter entertainment. We are confident that the future “new and improved” incarnation of the platform will serve as a real alternative or addition to traditional media.
We are planning to take this time, free from the intense development cycle required to continuously produce new content, to analyze all of your thoughtful feedback in order to create an even better experience. We are opening a new thread in our forum where we welcome you to submit any and all thoughts and ideas about the experience, share user testimonials, and present any leads you think we should explore.
We hope to revive the community in the near future and will preserve all of your user data for integration into our next edition. We thank you again for taking the time to pioneer a new user experience with us. Your feedback and ongoing participation has been integral in exploring this new form of communication, game, and community.
Eric and Asi,
Co-Founders – ImpactGames
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I recently was invited to write something for the Huffington Post and thought it would be a great venue to continue my thoughts on the subject raised in Why PeaceMaker costs money?
If you found the previous discussion interesting please have a look at this new post. Again it was difficult not to go into the many facets of my thoughts on this subject, especially in a short post, but I brought up some other issues that are interesting to me. As always I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject.
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I have been meaning to write this for a while now in response to several emails and postings. I am finally going to throw my first round of comments into the ring to respond to the overall idea that we should be giving away the game for free, why we are a for-profit, and finally why we are charging for the game.
To the comments we get that “I won’t purchase a game that should be free”, or along the lines of “how is a game that is meant to reach people charging money”, on a personal level it has always struck me as odd that thing associated with “peace” should only live in the non-profit or free segment of society. Another comment that we were always asked was “what is your business model”. This implies that because the game is about conflict resolution or “peace” that the standard models don’t apply. It is about spending where your values or interests lie, if your interest is in games why not a game that has received reviews from an established game designer such as “is fun, challenging, tense at times, and extremely well presented”? If you’re interested in the issues then we also equate the experience with a documentary. We address a social issue in an interesting way. I could go on and on for experiences that people pay for that are similar at a base level to what we are doing.
We did have a long debate on whether to be for-profit or non-profit. The issues that drove our decision can be summed up fairly simply with the reality that it was easier and faster to find funding for the profit venture. There is a growing trend for social entrepreneurs, self sustaining models with positive missions, ie positive changes through for-profit ventures ( even this years Nobel Peace Prize Winner Mouhammad Yunus ). We also chose to remain unaffiliated through investment or sponsors. We fought for a long time to maintain the mission of our company and were very sensitive to bias concerns. We continuously saw the opportunity that if we are financially successful we could influence the gaming industry as a whole to understand that this type of mature content is not only in demand but a financial opportunity. To lead by example and to help populate the space with more titles like ours. We still work with and maintain great relationships with several foundations and non-profits for providing the game in places where funding is a problem and for creating wider awareness and support for communities and educators to engage people through the game experience.
We feel we chose a price point that is fairly low for what we have invested in the project, and hopefully not a barrier for too many people. You could also insert a whole argument here on perceived value of something you purchase versus something that is free ( I am not going to extrapolate on that argument except to say this drove some of our decision on the final price ). The main objective is to earn enough money to be able to update this title, expand its community interaction, and to address other topics we have in the que. The primary drive has never been for personal financial gain.
I could and will continue to expand on this, as this is only some of the thinking and issues we have addressed. I attempted to keep this short but was unable to get the basics out without going on a little bit of a soapbox rant.
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Hi everyone,
The moment we’ve all been waiting for has arrived. After more than 2 years of production, the PeaceMaker game is available for online download. We are eagerly anticipating your feedback and comments, and we would like to thank all of you for the continuous interest, encouragement and mainly – patience.
Some more good news- PeaceMaker advanced to Finalist in Ashoka’s Changemakers competition (11 out of 158 peace initiatives from all over the world). The final stage is open for public voting – we would love to get your support.
Sincerely,
The PeaceMaker team
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