Understanding Conflict—By Gaming

The "game", Global Conflicts: Palestine aims to educate through role play

by Tom Ivan

Global Conflicts: Palestine takes the highly sensitive Israeli-Palestinian conflict as its central context, thrusting players into a fractured game universe in the role of a journalist whose mission it is to report on events as they unfold. “It is a mixture of role playing and adventure gaming aimed at people who are not necessarily avid gamers,” says Nielsen.

“Players approach each mission by choosing which angle they want to pursue: to write for a pro Israeli, a pro Palestinian or an impartial newspaper. You explore the environment interacting with characters using a basic branching tree structure for communication. Depending on your choices you build up higher or lower levels of trust. Trying to stay neutral is the hardest thing to do.”

The developers worked in unison with subject experts and researchers in a bid to capture the imagination of not only regular gamers, but of casual gamers and people who perhaps haven’t been exposed to games in a big way. Serious Games intends to market the title to educational institutions for students aged between 13 and 19, and to the private market, to players between the ages of 18 and 45 who use computers daily, and who possess an international outlook.

Nielsen doesn’t foresee the game working independently in the classroom, but as a tool that that can be integrated into curricula to inform practical exercises, lectures and debate. The game has already been trialed in Danish schools and the results were extremely positive.

“Even though the game was at a prototype stage, we had three things we wanted to be certain of. Firstly, that students learnt the same or more” in comparison to regular teaching methods, “secondly, that they were more motivated and engaged than traditionally and thirdly, that it would be something they wanted to repeat. Our results found that 60% of students said they learnt more from it than they did from traditional courses and 90% said they would like to do it again in the future.”

Huge Challenge

Nielsen believes that there is nothing currently available that is comparable to Global Conflicts, and says that what makes the game unique is that it successfully combines gaming and educational content.

“To successfully integrate the game goals and the learning goals to produce a gaming activity which is educationally relevant is a huge challenge. Some titles might, for example, focus on quickly shooting down letters to spell words. The problem with this type of gaming activity is that the focus is on speed so a lot of the educational energy and focus will be skewed towards the game element. What we really wanted to do was find a game mechanic that could have true educational potential. We had six or seven prototypes that we tested before we found the right mix.

“The game mechanic is really about talking to people, understanding their agendas, building their trust, and being able to recognize important information for your article. Initially we had quite a forgiving storyline aimed at casual gamers. However, this allowed power gamers to click through it very fast so we implemented a quote system which meant that you really had to think hard about what characters were saying. Players get about five quotes a mission which they transfer to a notebook for use in their article. There’s a nice puzzle element to it which tied in very well to the trust aspect of the game.”

Rendered in real time 3D, the game was built on a custom engine in alliance with Danish technology company Over The Edge. “They have a game technology engine called Unity that allows for very smooth integration between different programming and graphical assets. It’s very good for small to medium projects like ours where you can get a lot done quickly with very few resources.”

Funding for the game, which had a budget of around $800,000, was acquired from a mixture of sources, say Nielsen.