Today is the 4th anniversary of the start of the War in Iraq. Four years must seem like an eternity for the families of those who’ve been deployed. But for the Americans sitting at home, flipping the channel away from the latest carnage in Baghdad, four years is little more abstract. Of course, for your beloved Fido, four years is one third of his life. And if you bought a pet rat at the start of the war, chances are it’s going to expire any day now. So Statastic decided to see which species could outlive this war if they were born on March 19, 2003.

Experts and politicians have been a little divided over the past four years about exactly how long this war would last. If Dick Cheney had been right when he notoriously predicted in March 2003 that it would be over in a matter of “weeks rather than months,” then the perishable dragonfly could have outlived this war. Or if Donald Rumsfeld’s most pessimistic estimation of a 6 month war had been correct, a monarch butterfly could have outflown the conflict.

We even had a chance of keeping your pet hamster alive if Ohio had tipped John Kerry’s way. He would have started withdrawing troops at about this time in 2005. Now it’s up to a new crop of Democrats to make promises, underbid one another on withdrawal timelines, and hope that the public notices that’s we’re 2 hamsters into this war when they got to the polls next fall.

Today’s statements from President Bush that “success will take months, not days or weeks,” indicate that this war will likely continue through 2008. Three Republican frontrunners [Giulliani, McCain, Romney] have all supported the president, proposing that we maintain or increase current troop levels. It seems that if Americans elect another Republican president, the War in Iraq may have the same life expectancy of the Tasmanian Devil it has come to resemble.

Unfortunately, the war has proven capable of outlasting our own species. More than 60,000 Iraqi civilians and 3,217 U.S. troops have died since the beginning of the war.

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Today the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released a report estimating that 1 in every 400 Americans is homeless on an average night. This first annual comprehensive effort by HUD is an important first step in understanding homelessness in the U.S.

Of the 754,000 homeless, about 45% are do not find shelter each evening. The report also reveals the demographics behind homelessness: 65% are male, 45% are black, and a very high percentage of the homeless suffer from mental illness and/or substance abuse.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is the number of veterans who seem to be falling through the cracks. 18.7% of America’s homeless are veterans of war, and veterans are more than twice as likely to be homeless as those in the general population. With 141,000 homeless veterans in America, there are more troops living on our own streets than serving in Iraq.

In the wake of the uproar over the treatment of veterans at Walter Reed, perhaps we should look to the future homeless the Iraqi War will create. According to salon.com, more than 1 million have already served in our various wars on terror since 9.11.01. That means 6,000 of those who have served will be homeless in the future (see statastics below). Because veterans have a higher rate of homelessness, the war in Iraq will produce 3,000 more homeless than had we not gone to war.

Add the homeless to the casualties of war.

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Sources: Percent of homeless veterans, exhibit 3-5 (page 31) of HUD report; U.S. population of veterans: U.S. Census Bureau.

Last night Bush faced the nation, tail between legs, and announced in sober terms a plan to increase the number of troops in Baghdad and Anbar Province by 21,500 troops. This is not a novel approach. In August 2006, Operation Whac-a-Mole pulled troops from Mosul to secure violent areas of Baghdad. The results were dramatic… and temporary. As Senator McCain predicted then, once the troops moved on, the sectarian violence returned to the neighborhoods that U.S. troops had vacated.

Last night’s speech was Bush’s last stand. He seemed to finally realize that not only Iraq’s future is at stake, but also his historical legacy. He faced two basic policy decisions with four possible outcomes.

Using a good old game theory matrix, we see that although there is a chance that a Democrat-led withdrawal might succeed, it would not provide a political victory for Bush. The troop surge is the only attractive solution to a president with an eye on his place in history.

Policy A: Democrats secure a phased withdrawal from Iraq

Outcome 1): Iraq stabilizes or even flourishes as a beacon of democracy and freedom across the Middle East. Bush might get credit for his long term military strategy, but will more likely be blamed for a myopic insistence on prolonged occupation that would have ignited a civil war were it not for the Democrats in Congress.

Outcome 2): Iraq devolves into bloody civil war. Bush is blamed for starting an unnecessary war that could ignite sectarian strife across the Middle East. American military looks weak.

Policy B: Troop surge into Baghdad and Anbar

Outcome 1): Troops secure Baghdad and Iraq before Americans become impatient. Iraq becomes a model of democracy in the Middle East. Bush’s reputation is salvaged, but historians note that his “stay the course” tactics changed only after the 2006 elections.

Outcome 2): Additional American troops cannot break cycle of violence. Iraq devolves to civil war and American military looks even weaker and more irrelevant than if we had withdrawn before the civil war. Bush is blamed for strategic and tactical blunders that endure for generations.

No Free Refills

Three weeks ago President Bush announced plans to increase permanent active-duty military by as many as 70,000 troops. Those troops won’t recruited and trained until 2008, but Bush has already committed one-third (21,500) of them to the troop surge proposed last night. Those 70,000 troops will also be replacing the 25,851 dead and wounded during the war thus far.

The grisly truth is that 68% of the new troops that will be ready in 2008 have already been used.

Last night Bush struck a note of atonement, stating that, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.” Let’s hope that the latest surge protectors are not being sent to Iraq to protect Bush’s historical legacy. We cannot afford for Bush to be responsible yet again.

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*Maximum proposed troop increase

Sources: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, Washington Post

Statastico tries to provide a diverse look at world around us. I’ve written about butter cows, decapitation, planets the size of countries, even measured wieners. The result of this eclecticism is that some odd, disturbing (and anonymous) google searches have led people to my web site over the past month.

Some folks have pretty normal requests. Most web searches that end up on statastic.com are searching for one of three things: 1) nursing wage information, 2) video games, or 3) critiques of the Bottom of the Pyramid. These folks I can help.

Then there are the others…

Someone in Vancouver wants to know “how many breaths a human takes in a week?” All statastic can tell you is how much hot air from a politician it takes to fill up a balloon, but the good people of Vancouver are asking the right questions.

A Los Angelean wants to know the “definition of Joshua”. No idea, but have a look at joshuakucera.net, maybe he can tell you when he’s not worrying about The Rise of the Neo-Con Artists.

A Canuck wants to know about “cannibalism in Islam”. I’ll go ahead and field this one. Cannibalism is indeed a fundamental precept of the Muslim religion. And you are right to be worried: Most Muslims prefer the tender, maple-syrupy taste of Canadians. Now you understand why Bush is so concerned about Islamic Cannibal Extremism.

But maybe it’s the Romanians we should be focused on. Apparently someone in the San Francisco Bay Area is wondering about cannibalism in Romania. Hopefully, they were looking for this old Romanian folktale: The Cannibal Innkeeper.

Someone in Norcorss, Georgia (I’ll a assume an optimistic young man) did a google search on “super models AND alcohol”. Finally someone thinking straight. After reading my entry on how to drink the most alcohol per calorie, he now knows that supermodels prefer Keystone Light.

“Swiss cow subsidies” were on the mind of someone in Zurich, Switzerland. You know, I’ll bet Swiss cows are nearly perfect. They stand on two legs at the top of the hour when it’s time to be milked, and put the toilet seat down after using the cow-let. Well worth the EU subsidies, I’m sure.

Over in Utrecht, Netherlands, someone was wondering about Agassi and death. He’s alive and well, it was the death of American (men’s) tennis that had Statastico worried before Roddick’s encouraging run at the U.S. Open.

Finally, someone in Tucson, Arizona was thinking about “breast terror”. Dear god. Why anyone looking up breast terror on the Internet would click on a site called statastic! is beyond me, but a recent search shows that statastic.com still comes up third on the google search for the terms.

Perhaps the Arizonian was looking for a justification for getting breast implants during our Global War on Terror:

Shrapnel from rocket lodged in implants, sparing Israeli woman

August 15, 2006: JERUSALEM - An Israeli woman’s breast implants saved her life when she was wounded in a Hezbollah rocket attack during Israel’s war with the Lebanese group, a hospital spokesman said Tuesday.

Doctors found shrapnel embedded in the silicone implants, just inches from the 24-year-old’s heart.

It’s a weird world wide web.

In July of this year, Baghdad was in crisis. Death squads roamed the streets abducting at will and killing more than 50 civilians per day. Starting on August 7, Operation Together Forward concentrated 8,000 additional U.S. troops on 5 of the most deadly neighborhoods in Baghdad - Doura, Ghazaliyah, Rashid, Ahmariya and Mansour (see map).

At the beginning of the operation, Senator John McCain grilled U.S. General John Abizaid about troop movements in Iraq, especially the redeployment of 3,500 troops from Mosul to Baghdad. He was concerned that we were simply putting out bigger and bigger fires, responding to flare ups rather than developing a strategy, saying:

“What I’d worry about is we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole here.”

Yesterday the L.A. Times offered a preliminary assessment of Operation Together Forward:

“An ambitious military sweep appears to be dramatically reducing Baghdad’s homicide rate, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday. …

Similar sweeps in Baghdad and elsewhere since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 have reduced violence. But the bloodshed would increase when U.S. forces moved on. …

U.S. and Iraqi officials describe the Baghdad security plan as a last-ditch effort to stave off civil war and to shore up Maliki’s government, which has struggled to contain sectarian violence and deliver essentials such as electricity and gasoline.”

Twenty-two days after the operation began, it does seem that violence in Baghdad has been significantly reduced. Calculated on a monthly basis, there has been a 77% decrease in the number of civilian deaths.

Senator McCain has repeatedly called for more troops in Iraq to snuff out the sectarian violence once and for all. Is he right? By increasing the total number of U.S. soldiers in the Baghdad area from by 24,000 to 32,000, the troops are also becoming more efficient at preventing civilian deaths. In July, there were 76 civilian deaths for every 1,000 U.S. troops in Baghdad. During Operation Together Forward, that has dropped to 10 civilian deaths for every 1,000 troops in Baghdad.

But McCain’s comparison to Whac-A-Mole indicates that he believes troops movements within Iraq are a zero-sum game. As we move troops from hot spot to hot spot we are always chasing new problems. Perhaps. After the 3,500 troops in Mosul were moved to Baghdad, violence in Mosul did not increase significantly. Those 3,500 troops from the Stryker Brigade may have helped save as many as 622 Iraqi lives.

What’s more, U.S. troops in Baghdad appear to have a lower casualty rate in August than in July. Perhaps this is all due to the fact that militias such as those loyal to al-Sadr simply abandon neighborhoods where the U.S. coalition announces that it will be conducting raids. During Operation Together Freedom violence has surged in Diwaniya, for example.
But we have been down this road before. Here’s a description from the June, 2006 Christian Science Monitor of how the wealthy Amariya neighborhood first turned deadly:

“…insurgents began arriving in Amariyah after the deadly US assault on Fallujah in April 2004. The first jihadis sought haven with relatives, many of them former senior officers in Saddam Hussein’s Army. …

Not content with having found a haven, the militants set about transforming the demographics and social mores of the area. ‘At first it was just the outsiders, but some of the young men - surrounded by these people telling stories about what the Americans did in Fallujah and these preachers telling them it was their duty to fight - joined up,’ says Aqeel, a former resident of Amariyah who fled in February.

Soon, graffiti praising Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and promising death to traitors proliferated; new prayer leaders took over mosques, issuing strident demands for jihad over their loudspeakers every Friday; leaflets were distributed warning women not to work and to cover their hair, men not to trim their beards or wear shorts; then bodies started to appear on street corners.

Amariyah, a wealthy Baghdad … neighborhood of shaded gardens … has become synonymous with gruesome, anonymous death, as have other Sunni neighborhoods like Dora and Adhamiya. They are all examples of the ongoing battle occurring throughout Iraq to loosen the grip of the insurgency - and the tough fight facing the Iraqi Army and US forces to dislodge them.“

In June, Colonel Burleson said that he believed the violence in Amariya was “past its crest.” In June, Iraqi soldiers were more measured in their assessment of Amariya, saying that, “We’ve shut off most of the branch streets and are funneling the traffic through our checkpoints, so we’ve got a lot more control, but if we don’t maintain this type of control, what happens then?” The answer came in July.

Perhaps the administration should listen to those on the ground. A few days ago, a minibus driver who lives in one of the neighborhoods being targeted by Operation Forward Together said:

“As long as the Americans are here it is fine,” he said. “If they leave it to the Iraqi police the killing will just return.”

So Operation Whac-A-Mole is in place, and the results are dramatic… for now.

Throughout history, walls have been built primarily for the purpose of defense (The Great Wall of China), politics (Berlin), religious separation (Northern Ireland), ethnic divide (Cyprus), or some nasty combination of all four (Israel). But rarely are walls built purely to rebuff wage invaders.

Illegal immigration is an economic issue, thus the rules of supply and demand apply. If the demand for illegal workers is cut, wages for illegals will fall, and the supply of immigrants will fall as well. Right now it is a challenge for employers to verify the legal status of some workers (although, our policy of turning a blind eye doesn’t help).

The immigration bill currently in Congress addresses this by adding $1.6 billion for a computerized system to verify the eligibility of applicants for lawful employment. Once this is in place, fines could be increased for employers caught employing illegal immigrants. Voila, demand for illegal immigrants falls and so would the number tempted to cross an open border.

But the immigration bill directs twice as much money to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS is being authorized to spend $3.3 billion on border defense that consists of 370 miles of fencing and 500 miles of vehicle barriers that will only cover 47% of our border with Mexico. Construction of one foot of the fencing alone will cost $568.

Israel has spent billions of dollars on walls, trenches, even a proposed sunken highway. Meanwhile, smugglers between the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza spent just $76 per foot to tunnel underneath. We should count ourselves lucky to only have impoverished day workers trying to cross our border (I discount the terrorism threat - terrorists could more easily cross our 5,500 mile border to the north).

By employing a historically military tactic to a primarily economic issue, we will spend ourselves into a hole.  At least there will plenty of illegal immigrants to help us dig it.

Sources: Sunken road: Cornell University, The Current; U.S. Mexico Border Fence: Congressional Budget Office estimate; Isareai Wall of Separation: Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network; Fourth generation of Berlin Wall: Berlin Wall Online; Smuggling Tunnels: Defense Update; Vinyl Picket Fence: Hoover Fence, Co.

Notes: According to Berlin Wall Online a 3.957 foot wide segment of the Berlin Wall cost 359 East German Marks in 1975. Because this was not a freely traded currency, historical exchange rates are hard to come by. However, as a note of comparison, Berlin Wall Online mentions that a loaf of bread cost 1.04 East German Marks at the time. Thus the store of value in a segment of the wall is equivalent to 345 loaves of bread. In 2006 in the price of a loaf of bread in the U.S. averaged $1.30, so each 4 foot segment of the Berlin Wall was valued at $448.75. It’s not perfect, but you get the idea.

It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, and it really sounds like a duck.

Yesterday’s Washington Post editorial, “What Next?” gave a grim assessment of how a civil war in Iraq could explode into a regional conflict in the Middle East. Iraq has all of the necessary ingredients of a civil war: a growing tendency to identify with religious and ethnic groups rather than the Iraqi nation-state, valuable resources spread unevenly throughout the country, a growing perception that democracy does not reflect regional interests, and daily news of increasing civilian casualties.

A broader civil war would likely produce Iraqi refugees who could export the Iraqi conflict to neighboring countries. As we have seen in the recent Lebanon-Israel conflict, these neighboring states are willing to fund proxies such as Hezbollah, if not to intervene directly. The authors note that the foundation for a regional war could already be in place:

U.S. military and Iraqi sources think there are several thousand Iranian agents of all kinds already in Iraq…. Iran has set up an extensive network of safe houses, arms caches, communications channels and proxy fighters, and will be well-positioned to pursue its interests in a full-blown civil war.

Although Bush administration officials acknowledge privately that things are not going according to plan, Bush said publicly today that Americans “have to understand the consequences of leaving Iraq before the job is done.”

We’ve done a heck of a job so far. Insecurity has left the Iraqi economy in shambles making it easier for insurgents to find new recruits. One-fifth of the population is in poverty. Oil production is still 11% below pre-war production levels. Unemployment is as high as 40% in some regions, and inflation is rampant.

Iraq also has a serious brain drain that leaves little human capital with which to rebuild. According to a report by the Brookings Institution, 2,000 doctors have been murdered, and another 12,000 have fled the country. Internal displacement is also a growing problem: 200,000 Sunni Arabs have been displaced from western Iraq and up to 100,000 Shiites have fled cities to take refuge in the south.

Civilian deaths increased by nine percent from June to July, and have almost doubled since January, 2006. One of the more disturbing trends is that as violence has increased in Iraq, it has also become increasingly brutal.

When do we recognize this as a civil war? In the editorial “What Next?” Laura Stanton of the Washington Post produced a graphic that applied the percentage of deaths and displaced persons from recent civil wars to the current population of Iraq. Statastic used this data to gain further insight into the average number of deaths per month during these civil wars.

So how severe are the 3,438 civilian deaths reported in July, 2006? On a per capita basis, this is nearly 50% more deaths per month than averaged during the Croatian civil war. If violence in Iraq were to increase at the same rate that it increased between January and July of 2006, there would be more than 450 deaths per day in Iraq by July, 2007. This is about the same rate as the Kosovo war, but with one critical difference: Iraq’s population is 14 times larger. We would need as much as four times the current financial and military resources to quell a civil war, requiring as many as 450,000 soldiers. And that says nothing of how we would stop a regional conflict.

If a civil war does erupt into a regional war, Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack note that history is not on our side:

No country in recent history has successfully managed the spillovers from a full-blown civil war; in fact, most attempts have failed miserably.

Much as Americans may want to believe that the United States can just walk away from Iraq should it slide into all-out civil war, the threat of spillover from such a conflict throughout the Middle East means it can’t.

It’s time to acknowledge the Iraqi insurgency for what it is: a civil war. Quack.

Sources: Washington Post (primary sources cited include Amnesty International, Center for Study of Civil War, CIA World Factbook, Richard Holbrooke’s “To End a War”, World Bank); PBS Frontline map.

Notes: *The estimate for July, 2007 applies the rate of doubling in civilian deaths that occurred during the 6 months between January and July, 2006.

The average monthly deaths were calculated by applying the death rate per capita in each country’s civil war to the population of Iraq. This was then divided by the length of the each civil war. The monthly average was calculated using whole years for these conflicts. In other words if a civil was started in December of 2000 and ended in January 2001, its duration would counted as two years, not two months.

Why the lack of precision? Because using the monthly average of deaths during a civil war is an imperfect measure to begin with. Civil conflicts often hinge on a single event that may not have many civilian deaths (such as the February 22, 2006 bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra), or a monthly average may understate the brutality of a shorter campaign (such as the 800,000 who were murdered in Rwanda over the course of 100 days).

This measure is only meant to lend an international comparison to the debate about what constitutes a civil war.

Google Trends is statastic! Not many web sites get the statastic adjective, but it’s no surprise that the Google Labs have pulled it off.

Google Trends is an anonymous snapshot of worldwide Google searches broken down by the geographic origination of the search. My favorite part is that terms are normalized, which basically means that Google takes the search term that you’re interested in as a percentage of all search terms from the geographic area you’ve selected. Google explains here.

The word or words that appears at the top of each section were the search terms that people around the world entered into Google. In all cases except the last one, these are the top results from around the world. The last comparison between Arcade Fire and TV on the Radio was limited to U.S. Google searches.

Now to see what the world has on its mind!
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When Republicans Google themselves?

Top 10 cities around the world searching for the word “corruption.”

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Hope the Romanians are voting in the midterms

Top 4 regions around the world searching for the words “democrat” and “republican.”

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Planning a vacation?

Top 10 countries around the world searching for the words “witchcraft,” compared to their search for “cannibalism,” and “spontaneous combustion.”

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We care a lot. But not as much as you.

Top 10 cities around the world searching for the word “Darfur.”
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When men are in charge

Top 10 countries that searched for the word “sex” compared to the frequency with which they searched for the term “love.”

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Now that’s not funny

Top 10 countries searching for the word “joke.” I don’t get it.

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Time for the Butter Cow!

Top 10 cities around the world that searched for “state fair.”

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“Well they’re both really important issues… the boobs, I mean.”

Top 10 cities around the world that searched for the term “breast implant” versus how often they googled the name of the Iraqi prison “Abu Ghraib.”

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“Jihad” must mean something else in Indonesian. Besides, there are hardly any Muslims there.
Top 10 languages that searched for the word “jihad” versus the frequency with which they searched for the word “terrorism” and “al Qaeda.”

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What exactly are the Indonesians planning for?

Top 10 countries that searched for the term “UFO” versus how likely they were to look up “Elvis.”

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Washington DC just isn’t very hip.

Top 10 U.S. cities that googled “TV on the Radio” compared to how often those same 10 cities searched for “Arcade Fire.”

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It should come as no surprise that war made quick inroads into gaming. It translates well: war is a vastly simplified solution to complex problems. War is good versus evil, it has an enormous historical body of work to draw upon, and it appeals to men who make up 62% of gamers. But in 2005, “shooter” and “fighting” games only made up only 13% of total games sales. In fact, when you look at the $1 billion computer game market, strategy games outsell shooter games by 2 to 1.

As games have become more sophisticated, they have also become less black and white in interpretation of the world. The gray areas are starting to be addressed by a genre of gaming dubbed “serious gaming.” Serious games include any training and simulation games - including the games developed for the military mentioned in pt. 2 of this series - and they are an emerging resource for policymakers as well as war mongers.

The DC-based think tank Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars founded the Serious Games Initiative to “help usher in a new series of policy education, exploration, and management tools utilizing state of the art computer game designs, technologies, and development skills.” A growing subset of serious gaming is known as activist games. Activist games are designed to raise social awareness of issues near and dear to many non-profits - issues such as poverty, war, environmental protection, even genocide. Nonetheless, the oxymoronic genre of “serious games” has met some resistance in the world of social activism, despite good intentions:

“It’s like what Adorno said, the idea that it’s barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. But you saw this around film too, when it first started: ‘The medium isn’t serious enough to allow for serious discourse.’ I find it somewhat contradictory because people criticize games for saying there’s nothing good in them, nothing serious. But when games try to talk about a serious issue, they say, ‘You can’t talk about that in a game.’ ”

-Professor Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the George Institute of Technology, whose book on serious games will be published next spring by M.I.T. Press - New York Times, July 23, 2006

So what do activist games look like? While some of the games have share war games’ complex interactivity in massively multi-player online games (MMOG), most are much simpler. These stripped-down games often reflect the limited non-profit budgets which support the development costs of activist games. And with few exceptions, activist games are significantly lower quality than commercial games, which may further limit their reach.

Activist gaming still faces an uphill battle with more mature media: video games are hard to create on the cheap. Activist leaflets are cheap, web sites and blogs for social change are almost free. But even comparing the motion picture media reveals that blockbuster independent documentaries such as Supersize Me, which was produced for a budget of $65,000, can be made for less than blockbuster games.

The game A Force More Powerful is a role-playing game that puts you in the position of planner for a nonviolent movement seeking social change, pitting you against a regimepowered by artificial intelligence. The game required $3 million in funding and sells for about $20. Whether it will break even is doubtful.

But do games that inspire social change need to be as complex and expensive as Sim City? The online game Darfur is Dying was produced with a $50,000 grant and has attracted almost a million users. And one of the most simple and effective meassages highlighted below is conveyed in the editorial game September 12. The harder you try to exterminate the terrorists with violence, the more you terrorists you create. Perhaps President Bush should have played this before he invaded Iraq.

If our president is unconvinced that his current tactics create more terrorists than they destroy, at least he can take solace in the fact that there is a virtual suicide bus simulation in development for the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Games have come full circle to reflect the complexity of the world around us. They train U.S. war fighters, inspire terrorists, rally the local activists, teach diplomacy to the next generation, and treat the victims of our wars that exist not only in virtual reality.

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A Survey and Screenshots of Activist Games

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International Aid & Development Games

Food Force

About: World Food Programme’s “Food Force” simulates a country threatened by a hunger crisis. Acting as a humanitarian aid worker, the player completes a series of missions to plan and complete a successful emergency response. Players have to complete a series of missions ranging from dropping food parcels from the air to using food aid to rebuild a country’s economy.

Developer: United Nations World Food Program

Reach: Downloaded 4 million times in its first year online, audience target is children ages 8-13

Price: Free

Download at: www.food-force.com

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3rd World Farmer

About: Players manage an African farm, and are confronted with the difficult choices caused by poverty - drought, war, and starvation.

Developers: The first prototype of the game was developed as a students’ project at the IT-University in Copenhagen, Spring 2005.
Price: Free

Play online here: http://www.heavygames.com/3rdworldfarmer/showgame.asp

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Water Alert!

About: UNICEF’s unfortunately pedantic and un-engaging game, Water Alert takes you through the minutae of collecting water sample. This is more educational than most of the games mentioned here.

Price: Free

Play online here: http://www.unicef.org/voy/explore/wes/explore_1818.html

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Activist Games

Darfur is Dying

About: Users play the role of a Darfur refugee. In the simualation, your character runs to fetch water risking rape or abduction by Janjaweed militae before returning to the refugee camp.

Developed by: University of Southern California, Reebok Human Rights Foundation and The International Crisis Group

Funding: Reebok Human Rights Foundation

Reach: 700,000 in the first seven weeks of its release

Developer: Susana Ruiz, Ashley York, Mike Stein, Noah Keating, and Kellee Santiago - all graduate student at the University of Southern California

Cost: $50,000 grant from Reebok Human Rights Foundation and the International Crisis Group in partnership with by MTVu, MTV’s online network geared toward fostering actvism amongst university students

Price: Free

Play online: www.darfurisdying.com

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A Force More Powerful (AFMP)

About: AFFMP is a strategy game that is intended to teach budding activists how to use non-violent methods to influence government policies. Non-violent resistance tactics include training, fund-raising and organizing, protests, strikes, mass action, civil disobedience, noncooperation, and even such mundane actions as leafletting.

The game was developed by Ivan Marovic, co-founder of Otpor (Resistance) the Serbian youth movement, the non-violent movement that helped topple Milosovic in Serbia. Another apparent collaborator is the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), which claims to have helped oust tyrants in Serbia, Georgia and most recently Ukraine.

Developer: International Center on Nonviolent Conflict allied with commercial game developer Breakaway LTD.

Funding: $3 million from International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

Price: $19.95 Order here

Web site: http://www.afmpgame.com/index.shtml

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September 12

About: Newgaming.com has created a new sub-genre of editorialized serious games that they call newsgames. September 12 is a simple, browser-based game where your apparent goal is to bomb terrorists who are wandering amongst civilians through an Arab market. When you bomb them, collateral damage kills innocent bystanders. Grief-stricken relatives are drawn to terrorism themselves and you see that bombing only produces more terrorists.

Developer: Newsgaming.com and Gonzalo Frasca, a game designer and professor at the University of Copenhagen

Price: Free

Play online: http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm

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Peace & Peacekeeping Games

Madrid

About: Produced by the creators of September 12, Madrid was designed within two days of the Madrid train bombings as a memorial to the 192 victims.

Developer: NewsGaming.com – “This new site showcases video games that editorialize on current international news. Its team gathers a group of professional game developers and artists who believe that videogames can not only entertain but also encourage critical thinking. Periodically, Newsgaming.com will launch online video games related to major international news events.”

Play online: http://www.newsgaming.com/newsgames.htm

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Foreign Ground

About: A first-person perspective training game used by the Swedish military to that simulates peacekeeping operations. Instead of focusing on combat it deals mostly with solving problems using non-violent means without relying on duels and combat. The user play the role of a UN Peacekeeper and solves various tasks while on foot or vehicle patrol.

Developer: Swedish National Defence College

Web site: http://www.defencegaming.org/foreign_ground.htm

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Diplomacy Games

Peacemaker

About: Simulates the violence and political turbulence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Players choose between the role of an Israeli prime minister or a Palestinian Authority president, making policy decisions and communicating with the international community while dealing with unexpected violent events. The games teaches high school and college students about the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by focusing on the goal of cohabitation rather than on occupation and destruction.

“It’s meant to teach people about the different perspectives. It’s just a turn-based strategy game, but we’ve inverted the war model so it’s about conflict resolution. The end goal is to create a peaceful resolution to the conflicts.” -Eric Brown of Impact Games

Developer: Impact Games

Reach: Developers are currently testing the game in limited pilots and have not yet announced a release date.

Web site: http://www.peacemakergame.com

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Global Kids Island

About: “Second Life is a 3D virtual world in which the residents are provided with the tools required to lliterally shape the world around them. Teen Second Life is a space restricted to 13-17 year olds. Beginning in February, 2006, Global Kids has been exploring how to bring a youth development model around global issues into an island within this teen grid.”

Price: First Basic Account is free. Premium: ranges from $6.00 to $9.95 per month

Second Life blog: http://www.holymeatballs.org/second_life/

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Treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with Virtual Reality

Suicide Bus Bomber Virtual Reality PTSD Prototype

About: Researchers Tamar Weiss (Haifa, Israel), Azu Garcia-Palacios (Spain) and Hunter Hoffman (U.W. Seattle) are developing an immersive virtual reality simulation to help survivors or witnesses of terrorism who have developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The simulation of a terrorist bus bombing is designed to give the therapist control over the progression and intensity of the experience, including the addition of realistic visual and audio affects.

Developer: Imprint Interactive

Developer web site: http://www.imprintit.com/index.html

More info: http://seriousgamessource.com/features/feature_053006_ptsd.php

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9/11 Virtual Reality PTSD Prototype

About: A Weill Cornell Medical College therapist and a virtual reality researcher from the University of Washington HITLab are using virtual reality to treat victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, and their regimen appears to be effective in helping patients cope with the severe psychological trauma of the event.

Web site: http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/ptsd/

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Serious and Activist Gaming News

New York Times: Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time - reprinted in full here

Business Week: Getting Activist Video Games to Market

Overview of Games for Change Conference

Newsweek: Gaming the Poor

PBS Newshour: Can “Serious Games” Improve Your Mind?

NPR: Video-Game Designers Target World Peace

Interview with Professor James Paul Gee, professor of educational psychology, UW-Madison who recently received $1.5 million from the MacArthur Foundation to support his research on learning and video games

Use of virtual reality for treating post-traumatic stress disorder

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Blogs about Serious Gaming
Blog from Games for Change Conference

Blog from Susana Ruiz, a graduate student in the School of Cinema-Television’s Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California, part of the team behind Darfur is Dying

Good essay about the Syrian company Afkar Media that produced Under Siege

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Serious Games Web Sites
Games for Change

Serious Games Source

Social Impact Games

Video and computer games are no longer a nascent entertainment technology just for kids. It’s a $7 billion industry aimed at an average player who is 33 years old. In fact 69% of players are older than 18. So it should come as no surprise that an industry born to entertain is now reaching maturity. Violent video games have existed since the beginning. But innovation in gaming is allowing a wider range of viewpoints to use video games to reflect their own reality, recruit people to their causes, and even to mix foreign policy with virtual reality.

Early video games such as fighter jet flight simulators were developed in the private sector. Some simulators such as F-16 Fighting Falcon were so realistic, that the Air Force classified aspects of the game and started using them for training their own pilots.

The U.S. Department of Defense has used several video games over the years to train and recruit new soldiers. The line between government and commercial games is increasingly blurred. The Army game, America’s Army was first developed with U.S. government dollars. Now it’s available for Xbox. More recently, the government has flipped the investment equation, using venture capital money to fund video games, hoping that commercial sales will subsidize the classified versions of their strategy and war games.

But such public-private partnerships are a thin line to walk. Pandemic Studios, the creator of Mercenaries 2, has previously developed training aids for the US Army. Their most recent commercial release of the video game Mercenaries 2 features a presumably fictitious storyline about a group of ragtag mercenaries on their way to Venezuela to oust Hugo Chavez. Apparently this hit a little too close to home and there are accusations from the Venezuelan government that the game is propaganda from the U.S. Intelligence Community. Dreamy rockstar/activist, Bono, an investor in a parent company was even swept up in the controversy.

Resistance and terrorist organizations have also developed video games that tell their side of the story. Special Force is Hezbollah’s response to American video games that portray all Arabs as terrorists. In another video game, Under Siege, players violently fight the Israeli army in game apparently based on a true story of Palestinian repression and resistance.

And finally, domestic extremists have utilized video game technology to extol their own twisted values. The game Border Patrol has a deceptively innocent, cartoon-like interface. The object of the game is anything but innocent: gun down families crossing border between Mexico and the U.S. An even more technologically complex and disturbingly sinister game is blatantly named Ethnic Cleansing. The neo-Nazi goal is to wipe out all non-whites.

For the baby boom generation it is easy to ignore video games as child’s play. They are not. As you can see from the screenshots below, video games are effective tools of resistance, terror, war and death. But as much as gaming reflects the dark side of humanity, they are also showing signs of redemption, peace, and diplomacy. Stay tuned.
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Commercial War Games

Real War: Rogue States

About: A commercial release where a player can choose between two player profiles: the United States and the Independence Liberation Army, an amalgam of terrorist groups with access to heavy weaponry. Based on the game Real War, an official Joint Chiefs training game, all jets, ships, and ground vehicles are taken directly from today’s military - with a few special items right off the Pentagon’s drawing boards.

Developer: Rival Interactive

Price: $9.95

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Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

About: Players drop into Venezuela to help settle an oil dispute, take on “a power hungry tyrant,” and blow up lots and lots of stuff. Though Mercenaries 2 is based on a fictional scenario, the plot is “realistic enough to believe that it could actually happen,” a Pandemic rep told the AP.

Supporters of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, an outspoken critic of American policy, are not amused. “[Mercenaries 2] sends a message to Americans: You have a danger next door, here in Latin America, and action must be taken,” said lawmaker Gabriela Ramirez. “It’s a justification for an imperialist aggression.” Ramirez also said that Mercenaries 2 could be banned from the country by laws intended to protect children from violent games….

“I think the US government knows how to prepare campaigns of psychological terror so they can make things happen later,” said Venezuelan congressman Ismael Garcia. - Source: gamespot.com
Developer: Pandemic Studios

Price: TBA

Web Site: http://www.pandemicstudios.com/proj_mercs2.php

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Government War Games

F2C2 (Future Force Company Commander)

About: The Army’s war game and recruiting tool for Future Combat Systems (FCS).

From army.mil: “F2C2 is a real-time tactical strategy game that allows you to learn about the Army’s FCS program by giving you command of a Mounted Company Team in the year 2015. Through gameplay, F2C2 shows how FCS is designed to give the 21st Century Soldier unprecedented situational awareness and the ability to see first, understand first, act first, and finish decisively.”

Developer: SAIC

Price: Free

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First to Fight

About: First to Fight is a tactical first-person shooter in which you lead a four-man fire team in close-quarters urban combat in the streets and buildings of Beirut. It was created with the help of more than 40 active-duty U.S. Marines fresh from firefights in the Middle East and will be used by the United States Marine Corps for training.

Developer: Destineer & U.S. Marines. In-Q-Tel has invested in Destineer to develop additional training and simulation games for the intelligence community.

Funding: Private

Price: $29.99

Web site: http://www.firsttofight.com/html/

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America’s Army

About: America’s Army is a tactical multiplayer first-person shooter owned by the U.S. government and released as a global public relations initiative to present an image of the current U.S. Army and help with U.S. Army recruitment. A different version of the game for Xbox and PlayStation 2, America’s Army: Rise of a Soldier, is being developed by Ubisoft in collaboration with the U.S. Army. The Xbox version was released in November, 2005.

Developer: MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School was contracted by the U.S. Army to create the game
Funding: U.S. Department of Defense

Commercial Developer: Ubisoft

Funding: U.S. Government - three years and $7.5 million

Reach: 5 million registered users as of May, 2006

Price: Army version is free; XBox version America’s Army: Rise of a Soldier is $19.99

Web site: http://www.americasarmy.com/

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Resistance War Games

Hezbollah’s Special Force

About: Special Force is a first-person shooter military video game, published by the militant Islamic organisation Hezbollah. Special Force allows the player to take the part of an armed member of the Islamic Resistance to the Israeli invasions of Lebanon and to attack Israeli positions and Israeli politicians.

It carries a deliberate and specific political message, that is pro-Islamic and anti-Israel. On the cover of the game’s box, a message to users says “the designers of Special Force are very proud to provide you with this special product, which embodies objectively the defeat of the Israeli enemy and the heroic actions taken by heroes of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon.” It adds: “Be a partner in the victory. Fight, resist and destroy your enemy in the game of force and victory.” - Source: Wikipedia

Reach: game sold out of first run of 100,000 copies

Web site: Official website in English (Inactive as at 20 July 2006)

Video of game being played: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvmj7wj1UOw

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Under Siege

About: Under Siege is a sequel to the video game Under Ash. It is a first-person shooter, with the option of playing the game as a third-person shooter. The game focuses on the lives of a Palestinian family between 1999 and 2002 during the second Intifada. The player shoots at Israeli Defense Force soldiers throughout most of the game. However, shooting at civilians or otherwise hurting them ends the game. The game has been described as a docugame, since all the game levels are based on on the lives of 5 Palestinian family members during the second Intifada 1999-2002. - Source: Wikipedia

Developer: Afkar Media in Damascus, Syria

Cost: About $100,000

Price: $10

Web Site: http://www.underash.net/en_download.htm

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Hate Video Games

Border Patrol

About: Credited to the bigoted neo-Nazi Tom Metzger, puts you in the role of a hunter/murderer who patrols the southern border with Mexico. Your objective: “Keep them out…at any cost!” “Them,” by the game’s definition, are the “wetbacks” trying to cross the border from Mexico.

Developer: Tom Metzger

Funding: Private

Cost: Free

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Ethnic Cleansing

About: Created by the fringe neo-Nazi organization National Alliance, this elaborate and incredibly offensive video game seeks to extend the reach one of the most extreme viewpoints in American culture.

A description from the Anti-Defamation League: “The player roams the streets and subways murdering ‘predatory sub-humans’ and their Jewish ‘masters’ thereby ‘saving’ the white world…. The game has a high level of background detail and various National Alliance signs and posters appear throughout while racist rock blares on the soundtrack.”

From the resistance.com: “The most politically incorrect video game ever made. Run through the ghetto blasting away various blacks and spics in an attempt to gain entrance to the subway system, where the jews have hidden to avoid the carnage. Then, if YOU’RE lucky…. you can blow away jews as they scream “Oy Vey!”, on your way to their command center.”

Developer: National Alliance

Funding: Private

Cost: $14.88