Eric Zimmerman, the CEO of a game development company called gameLab, issued a challenge to his developers a few months ago: design a game inspired by the Nobel Peace Prize. Among the candidates:
"Peace Bomb," which sounds suspiciously like the situation with the U.S. in Iraq, is a Web-based interactive game designed for Nintendo's portable DS where a group of players promote "peaceful
insurgency projects" in a war-torn country, with the end-goal of embarrassing a "militaristic corporate government." In another, called "Empathy," players live in a nation on the brink of war, and
their goal is to keep their family together and alive, scavenging for resources to stay healthy while looking for ways to escape. That game's developer suggested commanders-in-chief would have to play
a game like this before entering a war to see what it looks like through the eyes of a civilian. "Peace Bomb" was the eventual winner, but it's unclear whether or not it is now in development as a
result of having won the challenge. In any event, as cool and immersive an idea as developing games to teach empathy and foster world peace is, geopolitics is just a tad more complicated than trying
to teach world leaders to empathize with the common citizens. Sometimes war is more about complicated economic conditions, or about crazy world leaders with access to nuclear technology who, most
likely, won't be picking up their Nintendo DS to play games about world peace.
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