The 9th Annual Games for Change Festival will be taking place (presumably in New York) on 18-20 June 2012, and they have put out a call for speakers and presentations. The submission deadline is February 17 at 11:59 pm EST. Accepted speakers will be notified on March 16, and will receive a complimentary pass to the Festival.

More information on the topics that they are looking for this year (as well as information about their review process) can be found here. The same page also includes a link to the online submission form.

h/t G4C email list

Video game wars

Editor’s Note: The following is reprinted with the permission of World Politics Review. For more from WPR, sign up for a free trial of their subscription service, get their weekly e-mail, or follow them on Twitter. Rex Brynen is Professor of Political Science at McGill University and co-editor of the PAXsims blog on conflict simulation.

By Rex Brynen, World Politics Review

When former U.S. Marine Amir Mirzaei Hekmati was sentenced to death for espionage by an Iranian court earlier this month, he was accused, among other things, of helping to make video games. In his televised “confession,” Hekmati stated that, after working for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, “I was recruited by Kuma Games Company, a computer games company which received money from [the] CIA to design and make special films and computer games to change the public opinion’s mindset in the Middle East.” He added, “The goal of Kuma Games was to convince the people of the world and Iraq that what the U.S. does in Iraq and other countries is good and acceptable.”

Needless to say, neither Hekmati’s alleged confession nor his conviction means the charges are true. Rather his arrest is better seen as yet another indicator of the escalating geopolitical tensions between Tehran and Washington. Still, the incident highlights the extent to which video games and international politics have increasingly intersected in recent years. 

As with any other form of popular culture, digital video games can be bearers of incidental or intended political ideas. For instance, with military simulations and “tactical shooters” being the most popular genres, it is hardly surprising that the post-Sept. 11 era would spawn a variety of U.S.-produced games that involve some combination of terrorism, counterinsurgency, weapons of mass destruction, the Middle East and similar headline topics. Kuma Games, for example, offers more than 100 scenarios for its Kuma\War game series, most set in Iraq or Afghanistan. Three scenarios involve Iran: Two are based on the failed 1980 American hostage rescue mission, while a third, released in 2005, concerns a fictional U.S. raid on an Iranian nuclear facility. The same company also produces “Sibaq al-Fursan,” an Arabic-language car-racing game set in a radioactive, post-apocalyptic Persian Gulf, where the villains fly Iranian aircraft and drop North Korean bombs.

Read: Global Insights: Ahmadinejad’s Latin American Tour Highlights Iran’s Isolation

Both series have a very small fan base, however, compared to blockbusters like the “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” series, which has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. While “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” features some fighting set in the Middle East, most of its plot revolves around the rise of Russian ultranationalists. Subsequent protests in Russia led to some scenes being deleted from Russian releases, even if one Russian video game distributor, bemused by the uproar, wryly noted that, “Activision and Infinity Ward are perhaps the only game development companies that still portray Russia as a high-tech superpower, capable of bombing the U.S.”

Typically, most tactical shooter games use the scenario largely as a narrative setting for game play, with little overt political commentary. There is, however, a general tendency to portray U.S. or Western forces as the “good guys.” A Cuban website condemned “Call of Duty: Black Ops” (2010), set in the Cold War-era 1960s, as “perverse” for glorifying U.S. assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. (Clearly they hadn’t seen the optional scenario that has Castro, John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara and Richard Nixon teaming up to defend the Pentagon from hordes of zombies.) When “Medal of Honor” was first released in 2010, its multiplayer option would have allowed players to assume not only the role of U.S. forces battling the Taliban, but also that of the Taliban battling U.S. forces. In the subsequent outcry, then-U.K. Defense Minister Liam Fox called for the game to be banned. The Canadian and Danish defense ministers criticized the game, as did some veterans and their families, while on U.S. military bases, exchanges refused to sell it. The publisher, Electronic Arts, ultimately tweaked the game by simply renaming the Taliban team as “Opposing Force.”

Read: Over the Horizon: The Defense Budget Revolution Won’t Be Televised

In other cases, game designers outside the Western world have offered very different perspectives on conflict and international relations. The Syrian company Afkar Media, for example, published two games in which players assume the role of Palestinians battling the Israeli occupation, “Under Ash” (2001) and “Under Siege” (2005). Interestingly, both games strongly prohibit players from targeting civilians. The militant Lebanese Shiite Islamist group Hezbollah has produced and marketed two games that showcase its struggle against Israel, “Special Force” (2003) and “Special Force 2” (2007). More recently, the Vietnamese company Emobi Games released “7554” – a tactical shooter about the struggle against French colonial forces that commemorates the Vietnamese victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

In recent years, Iran has also produced a growing number of video games focused on nationalist topics. Perhaps the first of these was “Special Operation 85: Hostage Rescue” (2007), a tactical shooter pitting an Iranian agent against U.S. and Israeli forces, developed in direct response to the Kuma\War series. Other recent Iranian gamesinclude several with nationalist themes set amid the colonial era or the Iran-Iraq War. Some of these games appear to have been encouraged by the Iranian government as a riposte to their Western counterparts.

Read: The Realist Prism: Iran’s Nuclear Pipedream, and Washington’s

By far the most successful case of state sponsorship of digital gaming for political reasons, however, is the “America’s Army” series produced for the U.S. Army. The games were specifically designed to improve the military’s image and spur recruitment, and indeed are integrated into some Army recruitment efforts. In the original edition, most scenarios were fought against insurgents, while in multiplayer games the opposing team appears as generic terrorists. In the latest version, “America’s Army 3” (2009), U.S. forces intervene to protect a threatened government against foreign aggression and address humanitarian needs, in a fictional scenario resembling the post-Yugoslavia Balkans.

In an era when digital games can be seen as both cultural challenges and possible tools of publicity and propaganda, and in the particular context of growing tensions between Washington and Tehran, it is hardly surprising that Iranian authorities might see Hekamti’s work with Kuma Games and his service with the U.S. military as proof of nefarious intent. Certainly, previous Kuma products had attracted considerable attention within Iran. And as electronic gaming continues to globalize and grow, it is unlikely to be the last incident of its kind.

Guest Editorial

Simulation in International Studies
Mark A. Boyer

Symposium Articles

NGOs—Cooperation and Competition: An Experimental Gaming Approach
Dirk-Jan Koch

Evolving Beyond Self-Interest? Some Experimental Findings From Simulated International Negotiations
Anat Niv-Solomon, Laura L. Janik, Mark A. Boyer, Natalie Florea Hudson, Brian Urlacher, Scott W. Brown, and Donalyn Maneggia

Multiple Identification Theory: Attitude and Behavior Change in a Simulated International Conflict
Alexander J. Williams and Robert H. Williams

Civil Engineering: Does a Realist World Influence the Onset of Civil Wars?
Richard J. Stoll

Weighted Voting in the United Nations Security Council: A Simulation
Jonathan R. Strand and David P. Rapkin

Estimating Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Simulation
William J. Lahneman and Hugo A. Keesing

Association News & Notes

Association News & Notes
Songsri Soranastaporn

In the meantime, our good friend Archipelago Annie has sent us a report of the previous CASL roundtable, held in October 2011. We’re pleased to present it below.

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CASL Strategic Gaming Round Table

Summary of Oct 25, 2011 Meeting

Joe Lombardo “Gaming in support of the Civilian Response Corps”

Games can play a critical role as part of a course by enhancing learning, however the game must be designing to compliment and reinforce the broader objectives of the course.  Mr. Lombardo spoke on two games designing in support of courses to training the Civilian Response Corps (CRC), and addressed key lessons learned.

For both games, the fact that they supported short courses that were run repeatedly over a several year period allowed for refining of game mechanics and elements over time.  Because these revisions were conducted in close conversation with course instructors and administrators, it was much easier to insure that changes to the course objectives were reflected in the games, and that the game elements were fully embedded in the course.  Both games also relied strongly on the use of rolls: in one highly scripted roles were used to simulate the tensions of the interagency process, in the other, teams took on the role of a red team to critique their own strategic document.

Peter Perla “Separating Sudan”

The Joint Irregular Warfare Analytic Baseline Project (JIWAB) has been developed by a team based out of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC) to produce a scenario for use in future irregular warfare planning.  The team has developed an interdisciplinary process to produce the final set of baseline products. This process includes scenario development via general morphological analysis, counterfactual reasoning, structured scenario fusion, and stakeholder analysis.  Separating Sudan gamed the scenarios developed during this process to flesh out the consequences of each scenario for use in later stages of the JIWAB.  The game itself involved several innovative mechanisms for gaining participant buy-in, including prolonged interaction with key experts and a role auction.  The game also subscribed to the philosophy of using the players as adjudicators whenever possible. The JIWAB team also applied Dr. Stephen Downes-Martin’s technique to analyze the control group as if it were another player.  That analytical team created an ethnography of the game, which pointed to the critical role of buy-in and experience in the gaming process.  The analysis also highlighted the role of the facilitator in drawing out specific actions participants would take, then eliciting the reactive actions of other players representing other stakeholders in the region.  While these techniques may not be generally reproducible, Separating Sudan was an “interactive story living experience” that was able to create a rich world for participants to think though consequences and futures.

Selected points of Discussion from the Q & A

Role of Emotion in Games

• Trust, both between participants themselves and the participants and the staff, was a critical force as it allowed participants to fully inhabit the roles.
• Players often needed to use break time to differentiate the choices being made in the game from their personal preferences, particularly when ethnically trick decisions were being made.  This often causes more conservative play then we might expect in reality and is worth noting in game analysis.
• Self-censorship in asynchronous games can mask the very emotions we look for in face to face exercises, suggesting the need for an alternative paradigm.

Value of Asynchronous Play

• The value of asynchronous play was agreed to vary based on what you want out of the game.  Generally, if the environment being simulated is asynchronous it makes sense that the game should be as well.  However, by its nature gaming is going to require more artificial limits then reality, and often will need forcing functions such as meetings to insure deliverables are done.  The big advantage might be logistical, but asynchronous games will almost always require more time to play then the same event run face to face.

The intent of this event was to involve a variety of participants in order to simulate negotiations related to crafting an end to the conflict in Afghanistan. Reflecting the real-world situation to the greatest degree possible, we expected the proceedings to draw attention to issues of discord and to highlight potential roadblocks in future negotiations, as well as to stimulate thought on developing potential work-arounds and to delineate areas of common ground. One of the principal intended benefits of this simulation was to develop its utility as a teaching tool that could be replicated for those preparing to deal with the Afghanistan issue or for students of the Middle East or of general foreign affairs.

We were fortunate to be able to bring together a wide variety of participants, some having dealt with Afghanistan over many years, others without such direct personal experience but with wide- ranging expertise in other applicable fields. Participants included military officers, government and think tank analysts, diplomats, journalists, academics, NGO representatives, and contractors.

The players were divided into four teams representing Afghanistan (the current government and the political opposition), the Neo-Taliban, Regional Actors, and the United States and Non-US NATO. In most cases, within each main category, players were assigned to represent specific national or factional entities, reflecting the spectrum of interests and positions even within a single broad category. Players were asked to focus on four principal issues in their negotiations: the cessation of hostilities, the current and future U.S. military presence, constitutional issues, and minority and women’s rights.

In preparation for the negotiations, each participant received a read-ahead with both general background and specific guidance on the positions for the entity he/she was to represent. Over a four-hour period, various sessions were structured to enable individual delegations to formulate their positions on the key issues, to negotiate with other delegations, and to engage in shuttle diplomacy across delegation lines. Rapporteurs from PILPG followed the negotiation proceedings, recording the key ideas that emerged, and drafted this synthesis of the results.

The full PIPLG report can be read here. Other PILPG negotiation simulations can be found on their website.

Principal Findings

Iran does not intend to forfeit the nuclear weapons in its possession, but will attempt to use them to reach an agreement with the major powers to improve its strategic standing. Iran assumes that even if the economic sanctions are strengthened it will be able to withstand them, and in any event, the international community will eventually agree to a dialogue with Iran in order to establish new rules of the game. These are among the principal insights to emerge from a simulation conducted at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) on the ramifications of an Iranian nuclear test.

In the simulation, the US administration exerted heavy behind-the-scenes pressure on Israel not to wage a military strike against Iran, with an implied threat that an Israeli action would harm US-Israel relations. In an attempt to persuade Israel not to take military action, the United States suggested examining the possibility of a formal defense pact and/or of including Israel as a member of NATO.

In response to the new situation, Russia proposed to establish a Russo- American defense alliance that would ensure the security of the Middle East states. Members of the alliance that are not currently in possession of nuclear weapons would make a commitment not to develop such weapons. However, states that already have a military nuclear capability would not be required to disarm. The United States was the chief opponent of the initiative because of its doubts concerning Russia’s ability to provide security guarantees, and because of what it claimed are the difficulties in implementing the alliance and the ability in the framework of the alliance to prevent terrorist and subversive activity. The American solution in the short term is deterrence and containment of Iran through increased coordination and cooperation with US allies.

Israel made it clear to the United States that it opposes an outright rejection of the Russian initiative, and greater cooperation between the West and Russia is called for, if only so as not to undermine the front against Iran. However, Israel stressed consistently that it cannot accept a nuclear Iran, and that it will not commit to necessarily reject the option of military action against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, implying that this was the case even if it opposed Washington’s position. Indeed, the Israeli military option is likely to be a significant and potent issue, if not for Iran then for some ofthe main players. The simulation showed that this option, or the threat of realizing it, would also be relevant following an Iranian nuclear test.

An acceleration of nuclear proliferation in the region cannot be ruled out, even if it does not occur at a rapid pace, as has generally been envisioned. US allies, especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have questioned the willingness of the United States to extend deterrent backing in the event that Iran acquires military nuclear capability. This in turn has led them to examine parallel options and/or to accelerate their own nuclear development. Iran’s crossing the nuclear threshold will prompt Saudi Arabia to strive to reach a strategic balance with Iran, and the Kingdom will find it difficult to adopt a policy of denial. It appears that Saudi Arabia, perhaps more than any other actor in the Middle East, has the ideological-strategic motivation and the economic ability to examine the nuclear route, and it is reasonable to assume that it will do so by means of outside aid and/or acquisition of an off-the-shelf deterrent.

Over at Tom Ricks’ “Best Defense” column at Foreign Policy magazine, Peter Bacon recently examined the possible contribution of video games to improving understanding of history and international relations, enhancing military training and preparedness, and sharpening the ability of even civilian policymakers to address key foreign policy challenges:

…In the foreign policy arena, video games can and should serve as a powerful tool for educating civilian and military personnel about war and foreign affairs.

Video games can serve to help bolster America’s glaring deficiency in one crucial discipline: history. Video games focused on war and IR provide refreshing bursts of information about often-overlooked leaders and wars. These games can offer descriptive backgrounds of leaders or events (e.g. Age of Empires’ description of Genghis Khan or the Crusades). These methods can sometimes provide a deeper and more-engaging understanding of history than just a textbook or lecture.

A subgenre of games, so-called “serious” games, goes further by explicitly trying to educate gamers about historical or political issues. For example, Niall Ferguson in 2007 played the World War II serious game Making History and played out some of his WWII counterfactual scenarios, such as war breaking out over German seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1938. His experience led him to conclude that his counterfactual historical scenarios “weren’t as robust as [he] thought.” As a result, Ferguson ended up advising this series. This episode, forcing critical re-examinations of events, anecdotally illustrates the range of useful educational experiences gleaned from games like Making History or other, current games such as Global Conflicts: Palestine or the future-themed Fate of the World: Tipping Point that can help civilians better understand history and policymaking, thereby making better choices when voting or arguing politics.

All of the above is great for civilians, but what about actual warfighters and policymakers? Games cannot finely simulate actual combat or crises, yet can provide training related to the planning and responses needed for tactical and strategic decisions. Indeed, military officers have engaged in a modern form of Kriegsspiel by using tactical warfare games for their training: for example, the Close Combat series proved so popular that in 2004 the developer released Close Combat: Marines explicitly for military training. Other games, such as the tank-simulator Steel Beasts or the situational training tools of WILL interactive, have been used by the military for realistic simulations of warfighting and decision-making.

Civilian practitioners, however, have not embraced gaming as readily as the military: while think tankers or civilian politicians outside the Pentagon may play games in an unofficial capacity, official efforts like the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Serious Games Initiative have petered out. In stark contrast, DOD policy practitioners embrace video games even in non-kinetic planning: Michael Peck’s article on a DOD budgeting game shows how policymakers can prepare for things as prosaic as the budget with games. Hopefully civilian policymakers in the future will use games, both serious, educational games and fun strategy games, to prepare for the decision-making necessary during times of crisis.

It is good to see more and more attention to serious gaming within the policy community and among those who think about building greater capacity in this regard—after all, that is what this blog is all about. However, I can’t help but play devil’s advocate on some of these issues too.

Video games are just one subset of games, and it is important we not lose sight of the contributions of non-digital serious and educational gaming. Certainly computer-based gaming can deliver computation modelling, complexity, immersive audio-visual experiences, systematic monitoring of student performance, greater content standardization across courses and instructors, and a wide range of other benefits. On the other hand, they can also suffer from inflexibility (it is usually much easier to reconfigure a BOGSAT, role-play, or cardboard game), “black boxing” (whereby outputs are rendered believable by the technology used to produce them, while the modelling assumption are hidden from users), rapid obsolescence (in either software or the platforms necessary to support it), and high development costs. Digital games have, and will continue, to transform gaming. However, they are only part of the gaming universe, and focussing on them exclusively only serves to obscure the contributions that can be drawn from other dimensions of gaming. Ludology doesn’t presuppose a mouse (or joystick).

Undoubtedly the military, and the US military in particular, games and simulates more than anyone. However, there are a great many relevant examples of games-based training and education out there that the column misses, even just in the Washington DC area itself. There is all the gaming, for example, that is done at NDU’s Center for Applied Strategic Learning—most of it explicitly interagency, and involving civilians from various government departments, Congress, state and municipal governments, and others. Moreover, while most of this gaming enjoys electronic supports, it is technologically-enhanced role play rather than video gaming. The United States Institute of Peace offers myriad courses on conflict and conflict resolution to government, NGO, and academic audiences that include a simulation/gaming component, and while some of this is computer-based (SENSE) or computer-facilitated (Open Simulation Platform), much of it is also of the BOGSAT (“bunch of guys/gals sitting around a table”) variety too.

Organizations like the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, UNHCR, the World Bank, ICRC, IFRC, and others also use some games-based training for their personnel. Again, however, it tends to be of the non-digital sort, both because they lack DoD-size acquisition budgets and because they often find more traditional gaming and simulation methods more effective, especially when teamwork, diplomacy, negotiation, coalition-building, and group facilitation are important parts of the skill set to be enhanced.

It is also important to underscore that effective teaching, training, and capacity-building is rarely delivered by a game in and of itself, but rather is a function of how that game is used and embedded in a broader curriculum. You don’t just sit students (let alone policymakers) in front of a game console and expect the learning to begin. In an educational settings, links to other course materials and components are essential. In all settings, the briefing and debriefing are of critical importance: even a good game can deliver little (or be counterproductive) without an effective debrief and discussion, while even a quite poor or unrealistic game can be used to surprisingly positive effect if discussion of its deficiencies to stimulate creative and critical thinking.  Similarly, in policy settings a great deal of attention needs to be devoted to how serious gaming and simulation might maximize its contribution to productive policy-making.

In terms of policy development, gaming takes time and energy, and it can be difficult to get civilian policymakers in a room long enough to do it properly. Having worked in a foreign ministry policy planning shop for a while, I can think of surprisingly few cases where the substantial opportunity cost of a lengthy game would have made it the best approach to take, compared to more traditional (non-gaming) methods of fostering productive policy discussions.

Finally, part of the reason for the slower take-up of serious gaming and simulation in the diplomatic, development, and academic communities is that an awful lot of the serious foreign policy games out there just aren’t that good. Unfortunately, the serious gaming community (of which I would consider myself part) has some real problems with what might be termed ”hypertechnoludovangelism”— which is to say, uncritical acceptance of too much of its own hype about the transformative effects of (digital) gaming. Perhaps we PAXsims folks are a little curmudgeonly, but to date we’ve probably found more serious digital and online games that we didn’t like than ones that we did (even though we’re course instructors with whole rooms full of games at home, and enough computers to run a small space program).

In summary, asking “why aren’t more folks in the defence/diplomacy/development/policy/NGO/academic worlds using more games?” is a good one. Indeed, there are all sorts of organizational, cultural, generational, and other barriers to game adoption, and it would be worth exploring more fully what those are and how they might be overcome. However, at the same time we should also be asking the questions like “what might folks be doing that does not fall within digital gaming, narrowly understood?” and “why aren’t people making games that more practitioners find useful?” and “how should games and simulations be used to maximize their potential?”.

Pic above: Simulating the typical policy process.

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In his regular gaming column at Foreign Policy Magazine this week, Michael Peck invades Syria. Milgeek note to Michael: the Turks have several hundred Leopard 1s and 2A4s, so perhaps using a modern German Army wasn’t entirely unrealistic after all.

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At the Smart War Blog, a graduate student discusses his ongoing work on developing an insurgency/counter-insurgency simulation of the 2007 Baghdad Security Plan for his class assignment  in Professor Philip Sabin’s well-known course on conflict simulation at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London:

* * *

As for Professor Sabin, this seems a good time to mention that his forthcoming book Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (Continuum Press) will be published shortly. It seems destined to join Peter Perla’s The Art of Wargaming (1990) as an instant classic in the field.

Simulating War explores the theory and practice of conflict simulation, as applied in the many thousands of wargames published over the past 50 years. It discusses the utility of this form of conflict simulation by setting it in its proper context alongside military and professional wargaming, as well as more academically familiar techniques such as game theory and operational analysis. The book explains in detail the analytical and modelling techniques involved, and provides complete illustrative simulations of three specific historical conflicts, as used in Professor Sabin’s own courses on the wars concerned. It gives readers all the intellectual skills they need to use published wargames and to design their own simulations of conflicts of their choice, whether for interest or as a vehicle for teaching or research.

You can preorder it via Amazon.com and elsewhere.

The Times

The Israeli specialists assumed that the following would occur:

THE US would try to restrain Israel from military retaliation and propose a formal defence pact, including possibly inviting the Jewish state to join Nato;

RUSSIA would propose a defence pact with the United States in an effort to stop nuclear proliferation in the Middle East;

SAUDI ARABIA, not content with US nuclear guarantees, would develop its own nuclear arms programme;

EGYPT would push for military action against Iran while Turkey would be likely to avoid a showdown with Tehran. If Israel were to become a member of Nato, Turkey would withdraw from the organisation.

All the predictions are based on current international policies.

The specialists – including a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, two former members of the Prime Minister’s Office, a former ambassador and others with close ties to Israeli military intelligence – believe that a nuclear test in January 2013 would be presaged by a series of provacative demands from Tehran.

They include an Iranian call for its border with Iraq to be redrawn; calls for sovereignty over Bahrain and low-level actions against the vessels of the US Fifth Fleet in the Gulf.

The specialists made clear that although Israel would come under pressure to abandon any military plans against Iran, it would keep this option on the table.

“The Israeli military option is likely to be a significant lever, if not toward Iran, then toward some of the main players,” said the minutes of the war game seen by The Times. “The simulation showed that this option, or the threat of using it, would also be relevant following an Iranian nuclear test,” it added.

“The simulation showed that Iran will not forgo nuclear weapons, but will attempt to use them to reach an agreement with the major powers that will improve its position.”

In their report, the Israeli authors, INSS fellows Yoel Guzansky and Yonatan Lerner, wrote: “Iran is closer than ever to the juncture at which its leaders will need to decide whether to stay in a relatively comfortable position on the verge of nuclear capability or, alternatively, to break through to the bomb. Iran has an interest in postponing the decision whether to cross the threshold to a later stage. Nevertheless, a series of regional and international developments is likely to cause Iran to decide to accelerate its nuclear development and to break through toward nuclear weapons.”

The original Times article is behind a paywall, but you can find a version here at The Australian, as well as a widely-cited AFP report (which seems to be based entirely on the original piece in The Times). The INSS website also released a summary (here), which mirrors the piece in The Times (and may have even have been the original source for it, or vice-versa).

For more on gaming an Iranian crisis, see the updated “Israel versus Iran wargame compendium” at Wargaming Connection.

As has been widely reported in recent days, former US Marine and former video game developer Amir Mirzaei Hekmati has been sentenced to death in Iran for alleged espionage and subversion. According to the New York Times, Hekmati was accused by Iran of, among other things, being involved in the development of video games intended to covertly change attitudes in the Middle East:

According to Iranian state television, a former United States marine who was convicted of spying on Iran and sentenced to death on Monday was also involved in a nefarious plot to brainwash the youth of the Middle East using an unlikely tool: video games.

In a video report broadcast last month, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the former marine of Iranian descent who was arrested during a visit to Tehran in August, allegedly confessed to a career in American intelligence that included a stint at a video game company in New York that was “a cover for the C.I.A.”

According to an English translation of the report published by The Tehran Times, an Iranian state-run newspaper, about one-third of the way through the report, Mr. Hekmati said he had worked for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, after he left the Marine Corps in 2005. Then, according to the newspaper’s somewhat oddly worded translation, Mr. Hekmati said in Persian:

After Darpa, I was recruited by Kuma Games Company, a computer games company which received money from C.I.A. to design and make special films and computer games to change the public opinion’s mindset in the Middle East and distribute them among Middle East residents free of charge. The goal of Kuma Games was to convince the people of the world and Iraq that what the U.S. does in Iraq and other countries is good and acceptable.

He reportedly added: “The head of Kuma called me and said, ‘I have received your resume from Darpa, and we have a program in which you can help us.’ ” Kuma, Mr. Hekmati explained, “was also a cover for the C.I.A. and only the chief of company knows that you’re working with the agency.”*

The US has officially denied the Iranian charges.

The game publisher for whom Hekmati worked for a period, Kuma Games, certainly does publish Middle East themed games. Most of these are simply plug-in episodes for its Kuma\War series (108 of them and counting) in which players refight various semi-historical incidents, ranging from the death of Uday and Qusay Hussein in Iraq to Aghanistan to Muammar Qaddafi’s last stand in Libya. While the perspective is rather American, these games are essentially generic modern first-person shooters, mostly set in post-9/11 Iraq or Afghanistan (although you can also refight the UK’s Operation Barras rescue mission in Sierra Leone). A couple of episodes involve Iran, two based on the failed 1980 American hostage rescue mission in Iran and one (published in 2005) based on current nuclear tensions:

As a Special Forces soldier in this playable mission, you will infiltrate Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz, located 150 miles south of Iran’s capital of Teheran. But breaching the security cordon around the hardened target won’t be easy. Your team’s mission: Infiltrate the base, secure evidence of illegal uranium enrichment, rescue your man on the inside, and destroy the centrifuges that promise to take Iran into the nuclear age. Never before has so much hung in the balance… millions of lives, and the very future of democracy could be at stake.

There’s really not much much of a political message in these games at all, beyond the notion that it’s generally not a good idea to get shot in a firefight.

Rather more interesting is Kuma Games’ newer episodic game Sibaq al-Fursan (Race of the Knights), the first episodes of which were published in 2010. This is sort of an apocalyptic Speed Racer-meets-Mad Max adventure, in which a group of heroes drives around an Arabia that was devastated by nuclear weapons (including the radioactive “Desert of Glass” and the “lost city of Dubai”), rescuing friends, battling the army of the False Caliph, and collecting gold-covered thorium beans (GTBs) to trade for various in-game upgrades. The game has been translated into Arabic (in Levant, Egyptian, and Gulf dialect), French, Urdu and Farsi—you’ll find the Arabic website here.

After a few introductory episodes, Iran pops up in this game quite a few times when the beautiful Princess Dima is kidnapped by the evil “False Caliph” to be dragged off to Isfahan (lovely city by the way, Princess!).  The evil military forces also subtly sport a sort of hybrid Iranian flag-IRGC logo (see above), and drop North Korea-branded bombs on the brave Knights, their muscle cars, and poor radiation-afflicted refugees alike (see below). The bombs, incidentally, don’t seem that much more effective than the real North Korean ones, and fizzle as often as they explode.

In Episode 4, we’re explicitly told that Zulfiqar al-Harabi, the “False Caliph,” is a former arms merchant who is supported by North Korea and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The dastardly villain seems to have kidnapped the princess in order to force her father, a scientist, to finish work on the ultimate weapon, which may soon be used against Damascus.

Is this a US-sponsored information operation intended to subtly promote the view among target audiences that Iran’s current nuclear program is a dangerous one? Or is it simply an episodic videogame that draws on current history, much as Hollywood movies or digital games have variously featured the Communist menace, evil South Africans, Latin American drug cartels, Middle Eastern terrorists, or even Canada? I have no idea. Certainly, however, one can imagine how already paranoid Iranian security officials might have been suspicious of an Iranian-American ex-Marine who worked under a DARPA contract, and also worked for the company that produced Sibaq al-Fursan, especially in a context of escalating US-Iranian geopolitical tensions. (Needless to add, however, Hekmati’s “confession” on Iranian TV is meaningless as evidence of anything at all. Forced confessions and show trials are a staple of Iran’s autocratic government, and some of the things he says—for example, about US policy, oil pricing, and OPEC—make no sense at all.)

At Slate yesterday, Will Oremus had a piece asking “Does the CIA really make video-game propaganda?” He notes that a great many games today address contemporary conflict themes, sometimes generating political controversy for doing so. Moreover, not all game playing societies have the same view of history, for obvious reasons. A case in point is the Vietnamese game company Emobi Games, which has just released 7554—a first person shooter videogame about the Viet Minh struggle against the French that commemorates the Vietnamese victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954 (it looks rather interesting too).

Getting back to the case of Iran, what might a covert, videogame-based information operation aimed at that country look like? Oremus asks that question to games researcher Ian Bogost, who suggests it might not look at all like Sibaq al-Fursan:

If U.S. intelligence agencies were making secret video games to foment unrest in Iran or elsewhere, they would likely be less violent and more focused on realistic decision-making scenarios. According to Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech professor who co-founded a company that designs games as marketing tools for clients, the most persuasive games are those that model real-world systems and give users a chance to see the consequences of different courses of action. A game aimed at Iranians might seek to demonstrate the pitfalls of Islamism or the value of participation in a democratic opposition movement. (It would probably not be called, as one Kuma title is, Assault on Iran.) One model might be People Power: The Game of Civil Resistance, a single-player, turn-based strategy game developed by the nonprofit International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in which the player builds alliances and chooses tactics to secure rights and freedoms for an oppressed populace.

I’m not so sure, however. People Power is not a terribly immersive game, and it is an open question whether that sort of politics-as-strategy -game approach would ever garner an adequate number of users. If I were trying to develop a game-with-a-message for casual users in a crowded digital game market, I would probably go with something a little more engaging.

UPDATE: Since this report was first published, Sibaq al-Fursan’s Arabic-language website has been taken offline, and replaced with an English language “coming soon” page. The videos are still available at YouTube.