NEW YORK — Monitoring Israel from a computer terminal with an aerial view of the landscape, the country's prime minister pauses at the sound of an alarm. Crosshairs zoom in to identify the trouble zone and a news report pops up -- there has been a suicide bombing. He has a decision to make: Does he retaliate with a bombing campaign of his own, order a targeted assassination, or respond through diplomatic channels?
This is not real life, but a video game based on real issues. Called PeaceMaker, the goal is for players to create stability in the Middle East as either the Israeli head of state or the Palestinian president. Gain enough approval points and you're a "Nobel Prize Winner;" lose too many and you're a "War Criminal."
The game is part of a growing breed of digital play that aims to educate users about pressing global issues even as they entertain them. In fact, at a recent conference in New York hosted by the organization Games for Change and Parsons The New School for Design, representatives from MTV mingled with those from the World Bank, the International Center on Non-Violent Conflict and UNICEF. Their shared vision: video games as tools for positive social change.
Their interest in video games should not come as a surprise. In Canada, more than 35 per cent of households own dedicated video game consoles. Half of all Americans play video games, for about 6.8 hours a week. (Some players are plugged in much more: Just last month, Smith & Jones Addiction Consultants in the Netherlands announced the creation of what it claims is "the first residential gaming treatment program in the world," to address gaming dependency.) In other words, there are few doubts that gaming is an extremely popular -- and powerful -- medium.
"What better medium to tap into social networks?" says Susana Ruiz, the creator of a game about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. "What better medium to bridge distances, and ideologies? It just makes perfect sense to me."
It made sense to Suzanne Seggerman too. Now the co-director of Games for Change, the former documentary filmmaker had a "transformative experience" with video games in the early 1990s after the editor of one of her films gave her a copy of Hidden Agenda, a game about Central American politics.
"I played for 12 hours straight, and I couldn't believe that games were capable of some of the same things that I had seen documentaries do before -- which is to engage people with really serious content," she says.
Ms. Seggerman then attended the Game Developers' Conference in 1997, in search of "cool people making cool games about politics." She didn't find any, but she returned to the same conference in following years, hopeful that the medium would "grow up" enough to sustain real-world issues.
It did. In 2003, Ms. Seggerman heard others in the industry expressing interest in games with meaningful subject matter. The following year, Games for Change was formed as part of the broader Serious Games Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
Toronto's Andreas Ua'Siaghail has also seen the industry blossom firsthand. In 2001, he and business partner Sean Hopen started work on Pax Warrior, an educational game based on Roméo Dallaire's experience in Rwanda. At that time, Mr. Ua'Siaghail says, the notion of a "game for change" didn't really exist.
"People's ideas about what games or game-based learning might entail is actually much broader than it was even five years ago," he says. "A lot of people understand that this is a great way to engage kids, and to help people understand particular situations."
Now, Pax Warrior reaches about 250,000 students through licensing deals with schools worldwide. "The reaction from students to the game is really, really strong," Mr. Ua'Siaghail says.
As for the arguments critics and concerned parents often raise about video games -- that they're addictive, that they encourage violent behaviour? David Rejeski, director of the Serious Games Initiative, points out that such concerns have been around since the advent of television, the last controversial medium. And few people working under the Games for Change umbrella seem interested in trying to control what is already out there.
Instead, just as organizations such as PBS, the BBC and the CBC created alternatives for television viewers who desired more thoughtful programming, today's socially conscious game developers are hoping to create more meaningful options for their own medium.
So far, without steady public funding, developers are generally left searching for grants from non-profit groups, are partnering with academic institutions, or are trying to mix their message with a for-profit enterprise.
One of the latest games generating attention is Darfur is Dying, developed by students at the University of Southern California and awarded $50,000 in a contest organized by mtvU, a channel aimed at a university audience.
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