PeaceMaker was featured on Fox Live this past Sunday as a follow up to the Annapolis Summit and the give-away of 100k games in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It is a positive piece, but what I couldn’t convey is that it’s really a team effort, and how much dedication, hard work and passion went into the creation of the game during the two years of production. Besides the development team at ImpactGames we received incredible support from content experts (Americans, Palestinians and Israelis), people who tested the game for us, advisers, industry veterans and of course the faculty and students at the Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon (where it all began).
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.
With funding from the Lounsbery Foundation, Professors at Carnegie Mellon University are working on a comprehensive research using PeaceMaker. The effort is led by Cleotilde Gonzalez, director of the university’s Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, with the cooperation of Laurie Eisenberg, associate teaching professor of history and our educational adviser. The research aims to find how prior assumptions vs. deeper knowledge of the conflict may affect the students’ decision making process. The research will be conducted in Carnegie Mellon Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon Qatar, Israel and the Palestinian territories. You can read more about it on the university site or in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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.
Around our launch last February we started a FaceBook group called “I Wanna be a PeaceMaker“. It was a small step, but PeaceMaker officially has its own social corner on FaceBook. We started the group to help spread the word about the release of our game and have since taken quite a liking to the online and community space… You can be sure we’ll have more to unveil in the coming months, but for now it’s open for your comments and suggestions. So, please add us to your groups and feel free to invite your friends.
Two interesting (and competing) lists have been published. Game Tunnel introduces the “top 100 Indie Games list” and TIGSource fires back with a collection of 50 “high quality independent games”. They introduce a short blurb on each game, and I believe that people who are interested in what we’re doing may like to follow some of the recommendations. Not many social/political/serious games made the lists, but there are some very interesting approaches to gameplay that you won’t find in mainstream titles.
Thanks to the Rampant Coyote Blog that appeared on my Google alerts for PeaceMaker.
From time to time we are receiving angry emails criticizing our asymmetrical design: how come the Palestinian President cannot attack Israel directly while the Israeli PM has a robust branch of military options to choose from. And of course, both sides challenge our neutrality. Israelis/Jews claim that we are one-sided because “we assume that the Palestinian President is not responsible for terror attacks”. Palestinians/Arabs want to know why they are restricted from directly attacking Israel.
Our assumption is based on the current situation and the current tool set of both leaders. We verified it with Palestinian, Israeli and American content experts: the Palestinian President controls a limited internal police force. On the other side of the border, the Israelis manage an extensive military with the ability to operate in Gaza or the West Bank. The two sides are unbalanced and we’re trying to demonstrate that. Many would contest that the Palestinian leader directly controls militant attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers. Based on inconclusive supporting facts, we have chosen to limit this interaction to indirect measures to support or curb Palestinian militant organizations, such as Fatah or Hamas.
Due to the latest updates of QuickTime and Java we’ve introduced a new version for Macintosh. It fixes the tutorial level of the game. This is also relevant to the owners of the Amazon package.
- If you own version 1.06 or newer please go ahead download the new patch.
- If you own an earlier version, please install the newest full version (1.063).
The NPR interview triggered some serious traction for PeaceMaker, apparently with the right audience. This week our Amazon package made it to the the top 20 in all video games and #2 in PC games. It was great to see our indie game with its unique message in the company of World of Warcraft and Sid Meier’s Civilization.
Check out this headline on Gamasutra’s industry news (July 20th):
“Meanwhile, the ImpactGames-developed RTS PeaceMaker manages a strong showing seemingly out of nowhere, as Amazon reports short supply yet a suddenly high level of demand for the title, despite it never having seen a place in the weekly top five since its initial release in May.”