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.
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, and even better to contribute your own testimonials and lesson plans for others to learn from.
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:
(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:
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:
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.
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.
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”.
ImpactGames is proud to present “Sanctuary for Deserters?” a game suggested and written by Lori Shyba, one of our players. This is our first foray into user-generated content and we’re excited to hear your opinion, so let us know what you think. We also opened a new topic in our forum to explore similar efforts by other players.
Since the launch of our public beta, “Play the News” has received some interesting reviews on the Blogsphere. There were positive reviews; TransBuddha says “ImpactGames has figured out a way to combine my old D&D love with my obsession with the news”, while Josh on The Knight Center blog calls us: “an interesting offering for those interested in new ways to deliver and interact with the news”.
We also enjoyed the satire on The AV Club, according to them PtN “will make you kill puppies”. Broken Toys’ Scott Jennings, however, was highly critical by claiming we “essentially ha[ve] abdicated any responsibility for making a decision”, pointing out that we have created a framework for the community to voice its opinion without advocating our own opinions or assumptions.
Getting feedback is great, and the beauty of the Web is that we can keep expanding and improving the platform based on reviews and comments from players. Josh of the Knight Center phrases it more eloquently by saying: “It’s interesting that [Jennings] refers to this site as a “title,” making it more akin to a static game product that is done at some point than a website that evolves and changes over time”.
Josh argues we should introduce crowd sourcing to PtN as “an effective way to diffuse the unavoidable agenda setting nature of Play the News… Creating a system that allowed the crowd to assist in creating the content could greatly increase the number of stories offered.”
Funny he should mention that… Because hidden behind the front-end of PtN is an easy to use content creation tool. It enables us to publish polished experiences around a breaking story in only a day or two. Our focus now is reaching out to different media partners so they will create their own games using our editor. Aggregating all these “channels” on our site would allow for very interesting comparisons of the the issues illuminated by different content partners, while obviously adding richer and wider content.
We do plan to open PtN up to user-created games. At that point anyone could create whatever advocacy perspective they want through the information and the potential courses of action. We will need to seriously address moderation and copyright issues, but it is definitely a worthwhile expansion. From our perspective, it is a natural step in the evolution of PtN but not an immediate one. First, we would like to establish this new media format. Once the “News Game” format is established, we can support civic journalism and user-generated content. As Eric my partner commented on one of these blogs “for us this platform has just been born.”
As mentioned in the previous post, we just introduced this feature. Below each game on the Play the News portal you will find a section called “Share This Game”. You may post any game to your website or blog using the iframe embed tag. For embedding the game, please note: because they have fixed dimensions of 600 x 450, you may need to adjust your website or blog’s width to accommodate a more pleasing layout. Here is a sample for the PA Democratic Primary:
An interesting report coming from CBS-Portland around the holidays. The video shows a small crowd standing in front of Toys ‘R Us, demonstrating against violent video games and offering alternatives- games that promote non-violence and are socially or politically conscious. You can actually see the list of these games on the demonstrators’ signs. I swear we had nothing to do with that…
The Peres Center for Peace Partners with ImpactGames to Distribute 100,000 Free PeaceMaker Video Games in the Mideast
Pittsburgh and Tel Aviv, November 21, 2007 — With the Mideast Peace Summit in Annapolis, Maryland just days away, 100,000 Israelis and Palestinians living in the actual conflict zone are about to try their hands at solving the peace puzzle—one game at a time. In an unprecedented giveaway, the Peres Center for Peace is distributing 100,000 free copies of the interactive game PeaceMaker to people in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
PeaceMaker is an award-winning interactive game that allows players to get inside the unpredictable politics of peace, discovering firsthand the huge challenges of leading a country, a people, and an international process. PeaceMaker players must choose to play either as the Israeli Prime Minister or Palestinian President. In the course of a typical game, players encounter real-life incidents affecting the Mideast, from protests and political pressures to violent acts, and the player must decide what to do next in order to achieve a virtual peace.
Approximately 75,000 copies will be sent to subscribers of the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz on November 27, with 10,000 copies of the game distributed through the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds. An additional 15,000 copies of PeaceMaker will be distributed to Palestinian and Israeli high school classrooms and taught by specially trained teachers in the coming months.
“Since we first got the idea for PeaceMaker, it has been our hope to put this game in the hands of people who live with the real conflict every day, so they can play as the other side. With this game, the people can succeed where politicians and leaders have failed until now–bringing peace to the Middle-East,” says Asi Burak, co-founder of ImpactGames. “We are so grateful to the Peres Center; their high reputation, educational expertise and outreach to community groups in Israel and Palestine made this project possible.”
“It’s significant that the PeaceMaker giveaway in the Mideast is happening around the peace summit, but also at a time of year when millions of Westerners begin their holiday shopping by purchasing games where war, violence and conflict are central points of the game. To win at PeaceMaker, you have to cooperate with the other side and reach an understanding; you must challenge any prior knowledge or assumptions you have about the Mideast conflict,” says Eric Brown, CEO of ImpactGames.
Leading a new breed of games that are based on current events, PeaceMaker was created by a former Israeli Army Intelligence Corps captain, Asi Burak, and American Eric Brown, who met at Carnegie Mellon University’s prestigious Entertainment Technology program. They created PeaceMaker with a panel of Palestinian and Israeli consultants and launched the game earlier this year. PeaceMaker is the first in a line of news-oriented games the Pittsburgh-based company is developing and is available in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
Fall semester 2007 is on its way and many teachers have begun using the PeaceMaker game in their classroom or in community events. Following multiple inquiries we wanted to address this audience specifically. We feel that the success of PeaceMaker as a new teaching tool depends a lot on the teachers’ feedback and we intend to take it seriously.
We have added a check box to our contact form titled “Educational Sales”. Although we currently do not support site license we offer different solutions for school labs. Please feel free to contact us and we will be glad to assist you via email or phone. For specific technical inquiries, have your IT administrator contact our support team and we will make sure to work with the configuration and policies of your network. After working with various schools we gained experience in dealing with specific firewall and/or strict proxy settings as well as different license distribution techniques.
We would also love to know your thoughts on “How I Used PeaceMaker in My Class”. Feel free to comment on this post and share your experience with others and with us.