Since its 2006 launch in an industry better known for conflict and mayhem, Impact Games has been developing a path for diplomacy and negotiation in the world of computer games. The Pittsburgh-based start-up’s game Peacemaker, which challenges gamers to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has found buyers in 60 countries, been adopted as a teaching tool in college classrooms, and was given away by Israel’s Peres Institute to 100,000 Palestinians and Israelis to highlight last year’s Annapolis Peace Summit.
“Peacemaker flips the more conventional war strategy game and turns it into a game about conflict resolution,” co-founder Eric Brown says.
These days, the IG team is putting the finishing touches on its next product, Play The News, and preparing for a push in 2009 to find partners among Internet-savvy information media moguls who see the value in supplementing news reports with an interactive game platform that gives audiences a chance to play the news.
Building on the success of the single-issue Peacemaker, a packaged program also sold online, Impact Games is developing Play the News for media companies seeking to expand their franchises in a world of online communities and social networks. Broadening its conflict-resolution paradigm beyond the purview of Peacemaker, a single-player game, Play the News seeks to draw communities of problem solvers onto an interactive, Web-based platform that spans a broader spectrum of current events.
During a 9-month beta-phase that ended last month, the IG team, which enjoys close ties to Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, used Play the News and current events content–“Everything from world events to politics to entertainment and technology,” Brown says–to create 126 games to introduce its own online community of players to the new platform.
The next step is to sell the platform–and IG’s services–“in which we function like a newsroom, where every day we see what events seem relevant for these games.” Online publishers would also select articles around which to create games and tag games to particular articles. Or the publisher could license the platform and use it in-house to develop its own games.
In the months ahead, Brown, co-founder Ari Burak, and an advisory team that connects the young company to gaming and entertainment giants Electronic Arts and MTV plan to seek partners for the product.
Source: Impact Games, Eric Brown
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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