September 12th

A while back, my good friend Jeremy Douglass and I were talking about the video game medium as an artform and he mentioned a Serious Game by the name of September 12th, developed by a company called Newsgaming.  September 12th is an extremely simple, Flash-based, "game" that was designed to articulate a powerful argument about the war on terror.  Its single page of instructions reads as follows:

This is not a game.

You can’t win and you can’t lose.

This is a simulation.

It has no ending.

It has already begun.

The rules are deadly simple.

You can shoot.

Or not.

This is a simple model you can use to explore some aspects of the war on terror.

At the beginning of the game you start out looking at a pleasant little Middle-Easter village, like the one below.

Most of the people in the village are just normal civilians going about their daily lives. They are colored blue, like the example below.

A few of the people in the village, however, are terrorists. They are conveniently colored gray and are carrying guns, like this guy:

"You" control a cross-hairs that you can use to call in missile strikes on the terrorists. 

Unfortunately, your missile strikes invariably cause collateral damage, destroying nearby buildings and, often, killing innocent (blue) civilians.  When nearby civilians encounter the dead bodies of their loved-ones they get very upset…

…and then they turn into terrorists.

The inevitable result of your efforts to exterminate the terrorists is…

…a city that has been reduced to rubble and filled with far more terrorists than innocent civilians.  Ultimately, the best way to minimize the number of terrorists in the simulation is not to fire any missiles at all.

Admittedly, this simulation is an extreme over-simplification of the complexities of the war on terror.  Nonetheless, I’m very impressed by it for two main reasons:

1. The clever and effective way that it makes its point
2. For giving a glimpse of a future in which games will be as important a part of serious conversations about politics as other media

I encourage you to try it by going to: http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm. (You will need to have Flash installed).  Don’t worry, it will only take a few minutes before you become extremely frustrated and choose to stop launching missiles…