When you read that someone is planning a game based on Virginia Tech, you can't help but cringe.

But game designer - and Virginia Tech alum - Manveer Heir seems committed to using the video game medium to tastefully and respectfully tell the tale of the aftermath of the April, 2007 rampage.

Heir, whose day job involves game developments for Raven Software, writes:

To make a video game based around these events is difficult and delicate... Bereavement in Blacksburg centers around the concept of loss and grief, and how people cope with it. The game takes place on April 17th, 2007, the day after the shootings...

 

You can use the phone to call your girlfriend... You can use your computer and see e-mails from the administration, as well as condolences from friends. You can watch TV or listen to music to escape... You can turn to bottles of alcohol to drown your sorrows. Or you can just leave the room and venture to other parts of campus and find other interactions. The choices are yours and they affect the way your character progresses through the game.

 

Internally, the game keeps a “grief score”. You start at zero, and positive influencing interactions will increase this score and negative influencing actions will decrease it... Ultimately, there should be multiple paths to end the game, just as there are in life. One can move through all the stages of grief, or become stuck... In the end, the game is one of choices and how these choices ultimately affect how we deal with grief.

On the other hand, not everyone appreciates what Heir is trying to do. At College On The Record, a writer who goes by "Technical Brilliance" harshly criticizes the project, referring to Heir as a "poor, misguided fool":

What are you thinking, man? I hope this design document stays in production limbo. A lot of my friends were personally affected by this atrocity, and I don't think they'd appreciate a game mocking their grief. 

GP: Readers, what do you think?

The NLGD Festival of Games opened yesterday with a special Pong match between the game's creator, Ralph Baer, and the mayor of the Dutch city of Utrecht.

Vertical Wire reports that the "heated" match was played on authentic, 1960's-era equipment. After dispatching the mayor 2-nil, Baer gave the keynote address to open the conference, which was designed to promote the Netherlands as a European gaming hub.

Among those presenting at NLGD are serious games guru Ben Sawyer and Spore design team member Chaim Gingold.

UPDATE: A reader, Rob F, writes in to advise that we've got an error in this story regarding the origins of Pong:

[I] just wanted to point out that Ralph Baer did not create Pong, Nolan Bushnell/Al Alcorn did.  Also, Pong was released in the 70s, so I'm unsure what 60s era equipment they were playing on, maybe Baer's Brown Box?  Think was also from the 70s, maybe late 60s.  Bushnell viewed Baer's Table Tennis on the Odyssey (the first home console) and basically ripped Baer off.  I'm not a big fan of wikipedia, but from what I scanned they got it right.

 

Ralph wrote a book a couple years ago, it's really good.  You can view a sample here.

 

The use of game tech to explore public policy alternatives is touted by futurist Jamais Cascio, writing for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies:

The big advantage of games as a foresight device is the capacity to fail in interesting ways: you can try out different, even bizarre, strategies for success, and do so without worry of harming yourself or others. It’s a form of rehearsal, a way to understand the ways in which the present may be manipulated to create a desirable tomorrow.
 

Cascio makes his case by detailing a trio of policy-oriented simulations. He leads off with Oil ShockWave, a petro-crisis simulation developed at Harvard. While previous editions were studied at the 2006 World Economic Forum and at the 2007 Aspen Strategy Group conference, a new version is intended for college classroom use. From the game's Harvard website:

Students play the roles of U.S. Cabinet members developing a policy response to a potentially devastating crisis that affects global oil supplies. Situations are presented primarily through pre-produced newscasts, video briefings and insert cards handed to the students during discussion. The exercise vividly illustrates the links between oil, the economy, and national security.

 

The box set... contains maps, multimedia components, simulated newscasts, a range of background materials, and an instructor's manual. To ensure that the latest information is always available to you, the box set will be fully web-supported...

GP: I must concur with Cascio's lament that the game is not generally available. It  sounds fascinating.

Cascio also looks at Budget Hero, a sim sponsored by American Public Media's Marketplace program:

Unlike some budget sims that give you nearly line-item control over what’s in and what’s out, Budget Hero limits your options to options that sound like policy proposals—Cap & Limit Greenhouse Gases, Link Alternative Minimum Tax to Inflation, and so forth. You also start with three budget priority badges, reflecting the positions you take as a leader.

Cascio is less impressed with Immune Attack, a health-themed game designed for high school classrooms.

 

Every gamer's favorite academic, MIT Professor Henry Jenkins, will be among the presenters at the 5th Annual Games for Change Festival which takes place June 2-4 in New York.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor will deliver the festival's closing keynote. Other speakers include Ben Sawyer of the Serious Games Initiative, Dr. James Paul Gee of Arizona State University, Prof. Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech and Heather Chaplin, co-author of Smartbomb.

From the GFC press release:

The only festival... will explore real-world impact, the latest games and funding strategies... Expert practitioners -- academics, activists, non-profits, funders -- will be called in to examine the impact of current games, evaluations planned and the ongoing work to build the field.

 

You will have a chance to see a variety of new games in development first-hand, and at the Games Expo sponsored by Microsoft, festival-goers can play the latest state-of-the-art games.

 

A NASA researcher speaking at a University of Manitoba workshop discussed using video games as an educational tool and disputed supposed links between games and criminal behavior.

As reported by the Truro Daily News, NASA's Daniel Laughlin said:

Since 1993, violent crime in Canada and the U.S. has declined by 50 per cent and during that time the video gaming industry has exploded. If video games were really linked to crime, then we wouldn’t have seen that decline in violence.

Laughlin is the learning technologies project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Baltimore. The space agency is working on an MMO to sharpen math and science skills among high school and college students:

I’d love to see a space-based game where the players are placed in real careers — astrophysicists, aerospace engineer. It would be a game where you need the expertise of real science to succeed... It’s got to be fun, first. Without the fun, no one will want to play it and it won’t be successful. But it has to use real science.

 

A freelance game artist and programmer has designed a video game which explores concerns over the excessive use of force by police.

Jason Rohrer writes in The Escapist that he was moved to create Police Brutality after viewing the famous Don't taze me, bro! incident in which a student was tasered by police while Sen. John Kerry gave a speech at the University of Florida.

Of his game design, Rohrer writes:

The video reminded me of how scary police can be... I'm not suggesting that the UF students should have physically attacked the police. ...Perhaps they should have done some quick, ad hoc organizing. Perhaps they should have collectively stood up to the police in some kind of non-violent, legal way.

Even if the students could organize on the spot, I wasn't sure what the most effective strategy would be. I designed a game to explore the possibilities. Police Brutality is a game about fear, collective motivation, ad hoc organizing, self-sacrifice, and non-violence...

 

A senior at California's Chico State University added a political flavor to three popular Nintendo classics for a recent art exhibit called "Eeprompaganda." The title is a mashup of EEPROM and propaganda.

As reported by student newspaper The Orion, Ryan Fitzpatick showed off mods of Super Mario Bros, Millipede and Dr. Mario. From the report:

Fitzpatrick reprogrammed the beloved "Super Mario Brothers" and turned it into "Super Democracy Brothers: The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism." Instead of Mario and Luigi... players were able to choose from President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney... The two men run around the desert, encounter men in turbans and hop over oil bins with Exxon Mobil labels...

Fitzpatrick likewise transformed Dr. Mario into Doctor Democrat:

The words "Hillary Care" stretched across the top of the screen and players became Dr. Hillary Clinton. The object of the game was to arrange pills into a medicine container, similarly to "Tetris."

Millipede was modded into what sounds like a potentially controversial take on the immigration debate, Minuteman Civil Defense Headquarters Presents: Border Stampede: The student newspaper, however, notes that the mod was presented in the vein of political commentary rather than political advocacy:

Fitzpatrick was afraid people would miss the comical aspect of the exhibit and find the games offensive... In the statement, he wrote about his curiosity with American culture symbols and the influence they have on thinking.

It took Fitzpatrick a year to create the classic Nintendo mods.

More than 300 people will attend the Games For Health Conference. The event opens tomorrow in Baltimore.

From the GFH press release:

The conference will explore the intersection of next-generation game technologies and health issues... attendees will participate in over 60 sessions provided by an international array of 75 speakers, cutting across a wide range of activities in health and health care.

Topics include exergaming, physical therapy, disease management, health behavior change, biofeedback, epidemiology, training, cognitive exercise, nutrition and health education.

Presenters include Dr. Richard Satava; Starlight Foundation; HopeLab; Realtime Associates; Virtual Heroes; XRtainment Zone; Archimage; Dr. Mark Baldwin of MindHabits; Electric Owl Studios; Noah Falstein of The Inspiracy; and Games for Health
co-founder Ben Sawyer.

The Games for Health Project was founded in 2004 and supports community, knowledge and business development efforts to employ game tech in order to improve health and health care. The conference press release describes the Games for Health Project as:

...produced by the Serious Games Initiative, a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars effort that applies cutting-edge games and game technologies to a range of public and private policy, leadership and management issues...

As a kickoff to the GFH Conference, a special news briefing for bloggers will be held at 1PM Eastern on Thursday:

When we speak of positive uses of game tech, it doesn't get much better than Nothing But Nets, an online game offered by the United Nations in order to highlight the need for mosquito netting in Africa.

After all, World Malaria Day is April 25th.

In Nothing But Nets the player steers a motorcycle and delivers mosquito bed netting to needy villagers. As games go, it's not state of the art, but it does drive home the need to combat mosquito-borne illnesses with proper netting.

There are also opportunities for the player to sign up as a donor or a fundraiser, but these are not required to play.

Via: Kotaku

By way of ConnieTalk, GamePolitics has gotten wind of a new message game from animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

Bloody Burberry employs game tech to bash the well-known British fashion house for what PETA claims is the continued use of animal fur in its designs:

Burberry may be best known for its distinctive plaid, but its use of real fur is making the design house synonymous with cruelty to animals. Burberry continues to use fur in its designs despite the fact that leading clothing retailers like Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, Ann Taylor, Polo Ralph Lauren, and others have pulled fur from their stores forever.

In the rudimentary game, players move a furry critter around a high-end shop, evading security guards and spray-painting a "no fur" message on some of Burberry's expensive designs. The site also features links to PETA videos and a place where users can sign an online petition to Burberry.

In recent months, GamePolitics has been tracking the development of ICED, a serious game designed to publicize the issues faced by immigrants in the United States. The final version launched earlier this month.

Published by human rights organization Breakthrough, ICED examines immigration issues from the perspective of the immigrant. This is, of course, a hot-button political issue these days, so it's not surprising that ICED has generated some controversy.

An article on Alex Jones' InfoWars trashes ICED, terming it "an illegal immigration training game:"

An Indian woman, Mallika Dutt, has released a video game that essentially trains illegal aliens how to sneak across the border and avoid border patrol agents and cops...

For the casual observer, Ms. Dutt comes off as your garden variety liberal “human rights” advocate with a useful penchant for technology. But it is a bit more sinister than that...

As the average Mexican or Latin American does not have access to a video game console, let alone a television, the game is more practically geared toward an effort to inculcate middle class Americans into the belief that illegal immigration is a human rights issue, never mind open borders and the influx of third world people is a globalist plot to turn the United States, soon to become part of a North American Union, into a feudal slave labor gulag based on the China model. It has absolutely nothing to do with human rights.

Asked by GamePolitics to comment on the harsh criticism, Breakthrough's Mallika Dutt pulled no punches in her response:

ICED - I Can End Deportation is a video game about the lack of due process in the immigration system as it applies to legal permanent residents, asylum seekers and people who are here on valid visas - it’s not about illegal immigrants - as anyone who’s actually bothered to play the game would quickly realize.

One of the characters, Marc, is a war veteran - and many vets, who have legal resident status, have been deported because of unfair immigration laws. Current detention and deportation laws hold people, even legal residents, in detention indefinitely with no access to a judge. Legal residents can be deported for minor crimes - without the opportunity to make a case before a judge.

It’s interesting that those who claim to be supporting the American way of life, are the very ones who are ripping apart due process and fairness in our legal systems...

GP: The immigration issue is surely a controversial one, and there are valid points to be made on both sides. But, frankly, the InfoWars piece smacks of prejudice and stereotyping.

Making it a point to identify Mallika Dutt as "an Indian woman" and asserting that "the average Mexican or Latin American does not have access to a video game console" pretty much show where the article is coming from.

And, note to InfoWars: ICED is not played on a console or a television. It's a PC game.

A newly-launched video game hopes to raise awareness about one of today's hot-button political issues - immigration.

The much anticipated ICED (I Can End Deportation) is available as a free download for PC and Mac from international human rights organization Breakthrough. A press release details the game and the purpose behind its creation:

Designed to spark dialogue and create awareness of unfair U.S. immigration policies, ICED... teaches players about current immigration laws on detention and deportation...

Players can choose one of five characters to inhabit and live out the day-to-day life of an immigrant youth. The youth are being chased by immigration officers, while making moral decisions and answering myth and fact questions about current immigration policies...

Breakthrough Executive Director Mallika Dutt described the creation of ICED, which is designed primarily for high school and college students:

It's important to engage young people in social issues... Games for change help people to better relate to an issue because they can put themselves into the shoes of a character experiencing injustice.

Close to two million people have been deported and thousands more affected -- many without just cause -- due to unfair immigration policies. When we let the government deny due process and human rights for some people, we're putting all of our freedoms at risk.

As part of its launch day happening, ICED will be featured on Global Kids Island in Teen Second Life at 8:30 PM EST.

Professor, author and game designer Ian Bogost has expressed surprise over the paucity of politically-themed games in this presidential election year.

Blogging at Water Cooler Games, Bogost writes:

During the height of the 2004 election... I remember making a prediction in a press interview. In 2008, I divined, every major candidate will have their own PlayStation 3 game.

I was very wrong about that.

But this year seems to boast less interest in election games... This year we have the rehashed White House Joust 2008 and a game about Chimps beating each other up.

In Bogost's view, online social networks and YouTube have surpassed game tech as a means to connect candidates and supporters.

In the United States and Europe, the cultural struggle over the video game medium typically focuses on graphic portrayals of violence and sexuality.

In China, however, concerns over so-called video game addiction are fueling the debate. At least, that's how MIT professor Henry Jenkins sees it. Writing for his Confessions of an Aca-Fan blog, Jenkins details a recent trip to China, where he attended the International Games and Learning Forum:

I was struck by how little of the conversation about the negative social impact of games centered around issues of media violence or even sex. I had noted a similar disinterest in games violence when I had visited China five years ago in the wake of a tragic fire in a cybercafe started by a high school student...

The Chinese had little interest in the argument that games violence [causes] real world violence. Rather, the incident was read in terms of concerns about the breakdown of traditional community life and the loss of the moral influence of the extended family... both of which were seen as a consequence of rapid cultural, technological, and economic changes. The incident was also read partially in relation to a focus on 'games and internet addiction.'

Could China's ruling elites have a vested interest in fostering the notion of game addiction? Jenkins speculates on this:

We need to be careful about taking this 'addiction' rhetoric at face value... For one thing, Chinese youth used cybercafes as their point of access to both games and the internet. To some degree, the Chinese government is using a rhetoric of addiction to rationalize their periodic crackdowns on young people's digital access... (see: China flags crackdown on undesirable online games)

In that sense, addiction rhetoric does some of the same work that the Firewall does in terms of restricting youth participation in the online world...

At a time when aspects of capitalism are reshaping Chinese society... addiction rhetoric gives the Chinese a way to talk about the impact of leisure culture and consumer capitalism on their lives. Playing games is problematic precisely because it is unproductive (or seen as such)...

Jenkins' lengthy blog entry also touches on game piracy and the serious game movement in China. It's definitely worth a read.

Within Range?

Sounds like a great title for a first-person shooter.

Not quite. The edu-game, created by students at Carnegie-Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, is designed to teach players how the Library of Congress classification system works. And even Fox News can't whine about that.

Probably...

Check it out.

Via: Joystiq 

In the past, GamePolitics has reported on various games, both indie and commercial, the very concepts of which have raised hackles.

These include the likes of Bully, Super Columbine Massacre RPG and V-Tech Rampage.

Some, like Danny Ledonne's SCMRPG, aspire to a cultural message. Others, like V-Tech Rampage, were released with the specific intent to offend, apparently just for the creator's twisted amusement.

But what if a game designer wanted you to feel outrage, but also hoped to motivate you to do something about it?

That is the case with Harpooned: Japanese Cetacean Research Simulator. National Nine MSN in Australia spoke with Conor O'Kane, who designed the game to raise public awareness of the fight against commercial whaling. O'Kane is particularly troubled by claims of Japanese whalers that they only harvest the animals for research.

O'Kane explained the reasoning behind Harpooned's direct approach:

If people [are] offended by the game they should be even more offended by real whaling... I hope people make the next logical step and realise that reality is much worse than a video game. The more people tell their friends about how disgusting it is, the better … it puts more pressures on the whalers.

Harpooned is a top-down scroller in which you control a "research vessel." Your job is to kill as many whales as you can for pet food, er, research. If you harvest enough whales in a row, you are rewarded with an "ultra-scientific bonus!"

Running into icebergs damages your ship, and colliding with protesters who are trying to protect the whale pods causes a loss of points for legal fees. Each level ends with you transferring your haul of whale meat to a cargo ship for "further research," Congratulatory messages follow, based on the number of cans of pet food and whale burgers your "research" managed to produce.

Harpooned is a Windows-only game created using the Torque Game Builder from Garage Games.

- Reporting from Canada, where he's carefully scrutinizing any pet food that says "Now with 25% more research!", GP Correspondent Colin "Jabrwock" McInnes.

Good timing, Ian.

In recent weeks soft drink makers and even fast food giant McDonalds have tried to shift the blame for childhood obesity from their own high calorie products to video games.  Today, Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games is set to release Fatworld, a new political game which examines that very issue. Of the project, Bogost writes:

Fatworld is a videogame about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S...

The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations.”

In Fatworld, players create a character and run a restaurant in a perpetual virtual world.  What you eat, how active you are, and how you run your business all have an effect on you and your town’s health.

By choosing your character’s dietary and exercise habits, you can experiment with the constraints of nutrition and economics as they affect your character's general health. Will it be wheatgrass and soy? Or fried chicken at every meal?

How much can you afford to spend on food, and how does that affect your general health? Characters who eat poorly will get fat. Characters who don’t exercise will move around the world more laboriously. Disease and death will eventually ravage players with poor health, while those with good health will live to a ripe age.

Enterprising players can also influence public policy and merchandizing guidelines in Fatworld in an attempt to discourage the consumption of fatty foods.  You can even force the town down the vegan path by banning meat.

User-created content such as recipes and meal plans can be shared with other players online.

Fatworld is published by ITVS Interactive, and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Via: Water Cooler Games

-Reporting from San Diego, GP Correspondent Andrew Eisen wrote this story while eating a well-balanced lunch

Training and Simulation Journal Online reports that the United States Army has established a project office to create and deploy video games for the training of soldiers.

Col. Jack Millar director of the Training and Doctrine Command’s (TRADOC) Project Office for Gaming, or TPO Gaming, said:

I haven’t seen a game built for the entertainment industry that fills a training gap, We will focus on the visualization piece of those technologies, not so much the entertainment piece.

One thing about the Army, there's no shortage of abbreviations. Robert Bowen, civilian chief of TPO Gaming, explained the game training concept to TSJO:

Immerse that soldier into a virtual or synthetic environment, then have them conduct a training task, using their SOP [standard operating procedures], and then AAR [after-action review] that capability.

There will be some cool user-side mod ability built in, Bowen added:

Can a video game game show the way to peace in the Middle East?

As Israeli, Palestinian and Arab leaders prepare for tomorrow's Annapolis summit, 100,000 average Palestinians and Israelis have been issued copies of PeaceMaker, an award-winning simulation of the conflict.

As reported by the Jerusalem Post, PeaceMaker was distributed by the Peres Center for Peace in Tel Aviv. A press release describes the premise behind the game:

PeaceMaker allows the player to try his or her skills of diplomacy and leadership by playing as either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President.  Incorporating real-world events and news stories, the game challenges players to succeed as a leader where others have failed; to experience the joy of bringing peace to the region - or the agony of plunging the Middle East into disaster.

Ron Pundak, director of the Peres Center, told the Post:

The way is pragmatism, entering the role of the other. You must take into account the other side. It will help (each side) understand limitations of each one's president and leader, and as well the limitation of the other side.

A symbolic copy of PeaceMaker will also be sent to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas upon their return from Annapolis.

Reporter Melissa Newton of Oklahoma City's KOCO-5 offers a balanced look at the emotionally-charged topic of immigration.

The focus of Newton's report is a ICED! (I Can End Deportation), an upcoming online game published by New York-based nonprofit Breakthrough, which describes itself as "an international human rights organization that uses media, education and pop culture to promote values of dignity, equality and justice."

Breakthrough's Mallika Dutt told Newtown:

It's a video game that has five young characters with different kinds of immigration status who try and avoid getting picked up by an ICE agent.

In the course of playing the game you realize that the immigration laws are really not working very well  and penalize people for very minor crimes... This game is really trying to show you that immigration is an American issue.

Oklahoma State Trooper Betsy Randolph looked at ICED! (apparently, only the logo, since the game is not yet available) and was offended:

From the very beginning, here's the small little people and here's the law enforcement person. It's a big white male that's standing towering over all of them. That right there sends the message to whomever is going to sit down and play this game, number one, you're already in the wrong because you're an immigrant. And number two, the big white man is gonna hold you down or he's going to deport you.

Of ICED!, reporter Newton said:

The game's maker hopes this high-tech role-playing will teach others what it's like to walk a mile in an immigrant's shoes.

The game is scheduled for January release.