Asi Burak runs his company, ImpactGames, from a storefront loft on a Pittsburgh street. Shoppers wander in, confused, and ask, “What is this? What are you doing here?”
“We’re making video games,” he tells them. But Burak’s main product, PeaceMaker, is no ordinary game. In a medium dominated by games that recreate war, Burak, who came to the United States from Israel in 2004, has devised a game that simulates peace. Its premise is straightforward: Players try to bring peace to Israel and Palestine, playing as either the Israeli prime minister or the Palestinian president.
Burak boots up the game on his computer. His monitor flashes through a timeline of moment/images—burning buses, bloody faces, fateful handshakes. The map of Israel, punctuated by cities, spreads across the screen. Gamers have to choose a side, but beware: Neither is easy. Almost immediately, red bull’s-eyes begin flashing. A bomb has exploded. A minister has made an inflammatory speech. Whichever side you’ve chosen, your troubles have just begun.
The goal is a two-state solution, including a high-speed train connecting the West Bank and the Gaza strip and economic cooperation between Israel and Palestine. To reach this, the judicious leader must consider the information available and make calm, incremental choices. Acting as the Israeli prime minister, it’s tempting to go heavy on security and immediately appease the Palestinians with offers of aid. The digital Palestinians are not so easily won over, however, refusing aid when it comes on the heels of aggressive action. A more successful strategy holds back on military action and opens up a dialogue.
Burak, 36, released PeaceMaker in February 2007 but came up with the idea earlier, while a graduate student at Carnegie-Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. He was older than most other students, having enrolled after serving in Israel’s military intelligence, studying graphic design and working in Israel. His seriousness of purpose set him apart from his classmates: His student profile declared his intention to explore video games as an “art form” and to design games with a moral message.
PeaceMaker wasn’t Burak’s first foray into edgy virtual political design. In 1998, Israel’s 50th-anniversary year, Burak created “Israel 2023,” an art school project which consisted of a walk-through of an imagined 75th-anniversary observance. In it, he imagined a country where Yigal Amir, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, was not just a hero but president of “Judea State,” where extremists controlled nuclear reactors. “If PeaceMaker is a dream,” says Burak, “I would say that was a nightmare.”
Getting PeaceMaker to market, if not quite a nightmare, proved challenging. Everyone from university professors to private investors turned him down for development support, Burak recalls. But Burak was determined to complete his unusual game, until at last “we found a guy who said ‘yes,’” he says. The unnamed backer, along with a non-profit promoting development in western Pennsylvania, provided funds to release PeaceMaker commercially.
The company’s first major sale was to Israel’s Peres Center—an organization formed by former Prime Minister Shimon Peres to promote peace—which purchased 100,000 copies, 80,000 of which it plans to distribute through Israeli and Palestinian newspapers. The remainder will go to schools, where the game will be paired with a seminar designed to provoke discussion.
PeaceMaker has received favorable reviews from serious gamers and has been linked to a new movement in the gaming world toward socially responsible games, including entries like Darfur is Dying, by mtvU, where the player is a refugee trying to gather water while evading Janjaweed militias. The genre stands out against market-dominant titles like Counter-Strike, another game set in the Middle East, in which players choose between two gun-toting characters, the Terrorist and the Anti-Terrorist. In PeaceMaker, by contrast, the weapons are education funding, relief packages and speeches.
Although the game is easy to master (one reviewer said he “beat it the first time around in about half an hour playing the Palestinians”), players love the concept. A reviewer for Eurogamer, Europe’s most popular gaming site, wrote, “I’m not a particularly emotional gamer … but the first time I realized I’d ‘won’ a game of PeaceMaker, tears came to my eyes.”
Burak has observed that Israelis and Palestinians who test PeaceMaker tend at first to play their own side, switching only when prodded. “As a player of Arab descent, I expected that I would have much more difficulty playing the Israeli role,” admitted Mansour Nehlawi, a Palestinian, who provided early feedback on the game. “However, I can say now that the Palestinian side is truly difficult, since the resources at hand are much fewer and there is little control that the Palestinian president has over rival factions.
“When you’re playing the game, you’re playing to win, and you put your feelings and biases aside,” Nehlawi adds. “Afterwards, you recall the events and the actions you took and think to yourself about how difficult it truly is from both sides.”
Burak is looking for a partner to distribute PeaceMaker in the United States, while also developing a new version of the game that will incorporate more current events into the narrative. What will lead to real peace may ultimately be much more complicated than anything that can be portrayed in a game, but Burak continues to expand his virtual world. The updated PeaceMaker will allow multiple players to act in a wider variety of roles and let them communicate so that they can coax peace from each other, instead of from a computer program.
