PeaceMaker: Play the News. Solve the Puzzle.
PeaceMaker Blog
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.”
This week we published our first news game with a media partner – ReadWriteWeb, one of the world’s leading tech Blogs. This is a first in a weekly series of tech games we are going to write together. With these partnerships, we aim to expand “Play the News” and the content we bring to the community. Our easy to use content editor enables us to continue to add different partners that can bring a range of content expertise and perspectives to the games. Please contact us if you are interested in such partnership.
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 Gameâ€. 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:
The closed beta is formally over and http://www.playthenewsgame.com is now open to the public. During the closed beta period we had 340 members who provided us with invaluable feedback and showed outstanding participation. We plan to continue to improve, update, and introduce new features to the site in the future so keep your suggestions coming. We know there are many more things we could add to make the site even better but it’s time to push the fledging out of its nest.
If you (like us) are enjoying active participation in the news, and think others will too, please help us spread the word. Many of you have asked if you could share your log-in with others or could invite others into the community, and now is the time. We added a “Share This Game” feature, so just like a YouTube video, anyone can embed our Flash games into their personal blogs or websites, as well as link to them from popular social networking and news aggregation sites (e.g. Digg, Facebook, Google).
The site is free of charge to end-users. We are excited to let you know that two top-tier media partners are planning to launch PlayTheNews on their site in the following weeks bringing even more content to the community. As promised, we have added all registered users to our iPhone raffle. We will conduct the drawing in the following days, and one of you lucky participants will be contacted with the good news.
We want to thank the community again for the amazing feedback and participation. We hope you will continue to Play the News, keeping our community vibrant and engaged. Feel free to keep sending feedback to us directly. Due to the success of the forum, we’ve decided to leave it open for future comments.
Sincerely,
The ImpactGames team
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 Newsâ€, 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.”
