Global Conflicts: Palestine

Global Conflicts: Palestine is the first in a series of serious games set in political hot-spots around the world.

Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen announced Tuesday the release for sale of a serious video game about the conflict in Palestine. Global Conflicts: Palestine is the first in a series of video games centering on zones of political conflict. In this first game, the player assumes the point of view of a young freelance journalist trying to cover events in Israel/Palestine. The paper demands neutrality, but the experiences in the game might make that difficult.

We do not merely wish people to play the game but really engage with it – feeling, thinking, and discussing it – they may be shocked, appalled, and disgusted seeing the inside of conflict not just the surface so often portrayed in current stereotypical computer games. This is not the glossy game universes you know.
From the philosophy of Serious Games Interactive

The creator, Serious Games Interactive, is currently working on “Global Conflicts: Latin America” as a follow-up product. The premise is similar, except the journalist travels to Guatemala, Bolivia and Columbia to face fraud elections, kidnapping, modern slavery, uprisings, coca famers and organ trafficking. From the web site: “The games produced will parallel the best programs from Discovery Channel – entertaining, educational, and engaging.”

Wired News published an article on “Global Conflicts: Palestine” and another game about the region, Peacemaker, last September, but it has taken another several months to finish the documentation and extensive testing. The software is available as a trial or for online purchase (20 Euros). The game engine for GCP is OvertheEdge’s Unity, an OpenGL development platform for MacOSX, giving the experience a very modern, high-tech feel not found in most educational software.

Experiencing Media Bias
In the full version, you have some choice in the identity of your journalist character and can opt for one of six missions—Military Raid, The Checkpoint, Mohammad and the Settlers, The Role of the Martyrs, The Other Side of the Coin, and The Role of the Media—for an estimated play time of 15 hours. For the trial version, the Checkpoint is the only option. It took a while to load the lone mission (to the point I thought my computer had crashed), but once up it had a very smooth feel to the controls and interactions.

This isn’t a multi-player game. As the journalist, you are invited to make many decisions throughout the narrative, most of which affect not only the story you can write but also the events that surround you. It is a choose-your-own-adventure kind of interaction, where you run (always running) from place to place and person to person but can only select between a few canned responses. Unlike that innovative children’s book series, however, the quality of the responses are very well researched and filled with subtext. I opted to write an article for the Global News, an international paper meant to be objective, but I could also submit to biased publications for Israeli or Palestinian readers. My choice of how to respond, who to interview and how much I give them in return impacted my perceived bias.

The goal of the game—aside from the pedagogical aims—is to become a successful journalist by submitting stories that get well-positioned in the paper. Optimizing that means finding ways to uncover a truth that editors want to print. It also means entering into relationships with the people in the city.

In a limited trial game, I met a couple checkpoint guards, a pregnant Palestinian woman who fainted in the heat while waiting to cross, a Palestinian merchant who wanted me to deliver a package of insulin from a Hamas contact across the border, family members who need help for weddings or traveling papers, and of course the editor who is my initial contact in the game. I agreed to carry the package, but didn’t understand where it was going exactly. It didn’t blow up, and neither did the pregnant woman at the checkpoint. There was a run at the border guards, though, and shots were fired.

Along the way, the interactions offer opportunities to gather quotes. I could only keep five at any time so I had to get in the habit of re-checking and pruning my notes before contacting people. Running the errands allowed me to gain their trust and get better quotes, but it also ran the risk of running late on the article or becoming part of the chaos. In addition to the historical and socio-political lessons to be learned, GCP also instructs on how to investigate a story and arrange an article. When it comes time to phone in your story, you are able to use your quotes and pictures to arrange the story in a particular way. My quotes were boring and not well organized, nor did I interview with purpose. That showed when the Global News trimmed my submission and ran it as filler near the back of the paper.

The hope is real that this game will become an effective teaching tool, increasing student engagement and achievement while making the teacher’s work more efficient. Explore real-world environments and interact with people’s true stories. The content and interactions were created through close collaboration with experts and real-life experiences. The game, which took almost a year of development, was thoroughly tested and documented. Although the site is currently devoid of content, there is a learning resource that will be available to aid teachers in integrating this game into their curricula. There is also a PDF document that outlines the learning goals and roles of the teacher and game in student education.

Serious Boom for Serious Games
Serious Games Interactive has some friends in the community, each company working on their own concepts to re-invent and invigorate the edutainment industry. Muzzy Lane has recently authored Making History, a strategy game encouraging players to improve upon rather than repeat history. Breakaway Games works on serious games for the military but also offers the strategic games Civilization and A Force More Powerful, which teaches non-violent protest and conflict resolution. Caspian Learning is working on personalized games, where the development platform is handed over to the users.

News Gaming is a community of developers who create games based on news of the day. They offer Madrid—developed in a day after bombings on March 11, 2004—and 12th September, which focuses on the civilian casualties following the Bin Laden attacks on the U.S. (and requires a Director plug-in). Madrid is a simple game where the goal is to click on dying flames in a candlelight vigil to increase the light and the volume of the singing.

Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen has been involved with gaming for the past ten years but recently published his Ph.D. thesis on on the educational potential of computer games. He is a co-founder of Serious Games Interactive and the Game Research organization. Simon is also an assistant professor in the Department of Digital Aesthetics & Communication at the IT University of Copenhagen. He has posted a great synopsis of his research focus on his web site.

In addition to the trial version of the game, you can download a trailer introducing the concept and visuals of the Palestine game. The SGI forum is as new as the game, waiting for users to contribute questions and comments.