Peacemaker
Peacemaker is out. For those who haven’t been following this serious game effort, it’s a title where you take the role of PM of either Israel or the Palestine Authority and attempt to make everyone happy enough to bring about lasting peace.
There are two good articles on it already: Ernest Adamds at Gamasutra and Sott Jennings at Broken Toys. Different takes, and they reference different classic games: Balance of Power versus Hidden Agenda.
The fact that we only have three significant games in this genre in 17 years is a little depressing.
Well, there’s also “A Force More Powerful” which came out about a year ago – not a lot of PR though. http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/ I think it’s at least as significant, particularly since it’s not only a trainer for nonviolent protest, but designed to be moddable so that one can customize it to a specific political situation you might wish to train for.
Is A Force More Powerful in the same sort of abstract “negotiate and set policy” genre though? That’s what I meant… there’s a rapidly increasing number of serious games about policy issues, but those are the other three I’ve seen where you get put in the role of policy decisionmaker in that way.
Talking about “serious games”:
http://www.3rdworldfarmer.com
Entertained (and educated) me for a couple of hours…