Recently I got an opportunity, courtesy of ImpactGames via Pajamas Media, to play a review copy of PeaceMaker, which is a game about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and peace process. The game, a $20 value, was provided to me free of charge.
I’m not much of a gamer these days. My gaming time is mostly limited to online poker (not for real money, you meddling bureaucrats) and the occasional session with Guitar Hero
The Game’s Premise
When you start the game you are given the option of being either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President. After choosing which side you’re on you then pick the environment in which you’ll be playing: calm, tense or violent. I’m assuming that these represent different levels of play along the lines of easy, moderate or hard.
Once the game is established your goal is settle the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians through various actions all with the goal of peace and an Nobel Peace Prize award...like the one Yasser Arafat got, I guess.
The action you can take on your road to peace are broken into categories like security, construction and diplomacy. As the leader you can control police and military forces, set curfews, give speeches, negotiate with various factions, etc. All the time things happen, such as suicide bombings and protests, that you must react to. How you react determines your approval ratings, and ultimately whether or not you win the game.
My Opinion Of The Game
To me, this game seemed more political statement than entertainment. The game itself isn’t very deep, and the interaction is rather shallow. I actually beat the game playing as the Isaeli side in about 30 minutes. As far as strategy games go, this one isn’t very involved and isn’t likely to keep anyone entertained for all that long. For $20, you could do a lot better.
The politics comes once you’re exposed to each side during game play. Playing the Israeli side is actually pretty easy. If you make all sorts of concessions to the Palestinians (tear down parts of the wall, lift trade restrictions, avoid sending the military in after attacks) while throwing a domestic policy bone to your own citizens once in a while (e.g. an “economic stimulus package” or a “social services” initiative) you win. Nothing to it.
Playing the Palestinian side, however, is all but impossible. You have no funds with which to institute policy programs or government construction. Talking peace to the Israelis gets you hated by your own people. Deploying police and attempting to arrest militants is pretty much ineffectual.
So you see what the message being sent to the gamers playing this is. In the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Israel has all the power and if they’d just make all sorts of concessions to the Palestinians everything would be hunky dory.
That would be wonderful if it were true, but the problem is that it isn’t true. The conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians is much more complicated than that, and in representing that conflict as though it were so simple (not to mention representing so one one sidedly) does a disservice to the entire, real-world peace process. One of the assumptions the game makes is that the Palestinians are all rational and actually interested in co-existing with Israel if the latter would only quit its aggression and violence. Which is total nonsense. Reality tells us that many, if not most, Palestinians are extremists and have no interest in co-existing with a Jewish state. Israel has made all sorts of concessions in the past only to be met, time and again, with more hatred and more attacks against its citizens.
Another assumption made is that the Palestinian President actually has control over the Palestinian populace. The game makes it seem as though, by placating the Palestinian President and providing his government with plenty of funding for education and medical services, peace can happen. What the game ignores, again, is that a lot of Palestinians have no interest in help from Israel. They have no interest in co-existing with Israel. Their goal is not peace but rather to drive the Jews into the sea.
But that reality isn’t expressed in the game. In the game, as long as Israel gives the Palestinians all sorts of concessions and funding peace happens and you win the Nobel Prize.
Conclusion:
As a video game, Peacemaker sucks.
As a educational tool about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Peacemaker sucks because it doesn’t accurately reflect reality.
As a political statement Peacemaker works, I guess, because it does manage to depict Israel as the real impediment to peace rather than the extremism and hostility of radical, Islamic, Jew-hating Palestinians.