I use the “Peacemaker” game to help students in my graduate seminar understand the limits on actions of world leaders, and to teach how to see conflict from the viewpoint of the opponent and bystander. My course examines the contemporary use of violence by States and non-state agents.
Behavioral scientists and educators are trained to view conflict differently from soldiers or diplomats, so we learn to apply psychological principles to the analysis of terrorism and terrorist networks. We apply principles of conflict resolution to understanding global conflict, using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a primary example.
The course is structured around a “Peacemaker” lab each week, followed by a weekly lecture. My students work in teams to learn how to be effective consultants within governmental and non-governmental (NGO) agencies.
In February we are launching a closed beta of our new online product: Play the News, imagine if you will Fantasy Sports meets the Evening News. As a player you can choose your role and participate in a variety of real events: domestic, global, serious news as well as softer issues and entertainment. You can gain a deeper understanding of the day’s headlines while voicing your opinion. You will be measured vs. reality as well as against the performance of other community members.
To make it a bit more interesting for those of you that choose to help us out we will be giving away an iPhone to one lucky participant. Just by signing up you have a chance to win. Perform well on the platform to raise your chances.
If you would like to take part and help us in shaping this unique product, please use the contact form. If possible and you feel verbose, we’d love to hear in 1-2 sentences who you are, and why you are interested to join. We apologize in advance if we can’t accommodate everyone, as it is a limited beta. In any case, your personal data is guaranteed and will not be used for any other purpose, not now and not in the future.
Patrick, our designer and artist, has updated our PeaceMaker videos and gathered them all under one roof, so you are invited to watch the ImpactGames’ channel on YouTube. Feel free to comment and subscribe for future releases!
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.
I am teaching at the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My course compares online and face-to-face coexistence activities aimed at bridging between young people living on different sides of the political, ethnic and religious divides in the Middle East. This course is based upon 3 years of work as a postdoc student at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.
Given that my course examines peace building processes among Israeli and Palestinian youths, I thought to let my students explore how Peacemaker can be utilized for this purpose. In order to learn more deeply about Peacemaker, the students played the game a few times. Then we analyzed various apsects of Peacemaker such as photos and videos used to capture events, startegies that can be taken by the Israeli prime minister and by the Palestinian president to achieve peace, and the design of the Israeli version vs. the Palestinian version.
After learning more about the game, my students had to decide how they want to use Peacemaker in their final class assignment. One student decided to run the game among Israeli-Jew and Palestinian high school pupils from East and West Jerusalem. She wants to examine how the game impacts attitudes toward the complexity of the conflict and toward the “other side”. Another student chose to run the game among Israeli and American students in order to estimate the impact of knowledge about the conflict on playing Peacemaker. Two of my students analyze the photos used in the game in order to explore how Israelis and Palestinians are represented in Peacemaker. Another student develops an activity that can be conducted among high school pupils before and after playing the game. After my students submit their final class assignments on March 2008, we can publish short posts about them.
For the aforementioned class assignments, I developed a platform together with Tom Calthrop from Barnraiser, a Swedish based non-profit organization dedicated to giving people the tools they need to share knowledge and advance society through social software. This platform includes a discussion forum, a resource center and a notes wall. The students contribute information to this platform and further elaborate it as they make progress in their work.
All the aforementioned process could not happen without the team that created Peacemaker and the Peres Center for Peace that distributed copies of the game in Israel and the West Bank.
We’ve mentioned Game Tunnel in the past as a good source on independent games. They are closing 2007 with their “Game of the Year” awards in various categories. PeaceMaker has won 3rd place in the ‘Sim Games’ category (the 1st place went to Venture Arctic by Pocketwatch Games). Here is Game Tunnel’s take on our work:
“Peacemaker brings players into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by placing them at the head of either of the two sides involved. Though it is just a game, Peacemaker dreams of being more and is being used as a teaching tool to help people understand just how complicated the struggle for peace is, with the hope of helping the real-world peace process. While most educational games tend to feel more like school than fun, Peacemaker gets everything right. It is captivating in every sense of the word, and inspirational, staying true to the situation and providing hours of gripping and entertaining gameplay.”
Edit 1.15 – this position is no longer open, thanks for all the applications!
This time around we are looking for a creative writer to lead, manage and write content for our online interactive experiences. The candidate should have a mastery of textual writing as well as the ability to attach visual and audible references to their work. We would require interested candidates to submit examples of their previous work in a range of fields, such as: fiction, non-fiction, technical writing, video games and/or journalism. We are looking for dedicated individuals with deep understanding and immersion in current events on diverse topics: Global, US, entertainment, technology, business and more. Please note that the application process will include a writing test on a selected topic/s. To Apply please send your cover letter and resume to jobs (at) impactgames.com
The Boston Globe reports on a peace studies course for ninth-graders in the Hillside school, Marlborough. Course activities include keeping a “neutrality” media log, exploring famous peacemakers, learning negotiation techniques and… playing PeaceMaker. One of the students said on the interview: “[PeaceMaker] was a little bit difficult, you did one thing that made someone happy, but it made someone else unhappy.” This feedback regarding the harsh realities of leadership is something we hear a lot. It’s always interesting to see how different it is to explore this from the leader’s chair (rather than the TV couch).
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).
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…