Henry Jenkins, an MIT professor who studies games and learning, said the medium has matured along with the young people who were raised on it.
"The generation that grew up with Super Mario is entering the workplace, entering politics, so they see games as just another good tool to use to communicate," he added. "If games are going to be a mature medium, they're going to serve a variety of functions. It's like with film. We think first of using it for entertainment, but then also for education and advertising and politics and all that stuff."
Better than `Grand Theft Auto?'
Given away free, they have found astonishingly large audiences. The UN game, Food Force, has been downloaded by 4 million players, a number to rival chart-busting commercial hits like Halo or Grand Theft Auto. In May, MTV's college channel released an online game called Darfur is Dying in which players escape the Janjaweed while foraging for water to support their village: Despite its cartoonish graphics, it is a strangely powerful experience. In the first month alone 700,000 people played it. Of those, tens of thousands entered an "action" area of the game -- political action, that is -- where they can send e-mail messages to politicians and demand action on Darfur.
A Force More Powerful is considerably more complex. Players must make dozens of decisions as they try to foment democratic uprisings, but each action brings unexpected consequences. A huge demonstration may get your leaders arrested by the police, a boycott is safer but less effective, and so on.
"The beauty of the game is that players can teach themselves by trying things out," Marovic said.
This is the central conceit behind all these efforts: that games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work.
"You could have some big theory about society, but these days it's like, sorry, people aren't going to read your white paper on it," said Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the George Institute of Technology, whose book on serious games will be published next spring by MIT Press. "Put it in a game, and they'll discover what you're talking about themselves."
Video games, serious-games advocates say, also possess a persuasive element that is missing from books or movies: They let the player become a different person (at least for an hour or two), and see the world from a new perspective.
When Burak first showed Peacemaker to Israelis and Palestinians, he found that they were most interested in playing as their own "side." But when he pushed them to switch positions they developed a more nuanced sense of why the other side acted as it did.
In Qatar several people told him that "they kind of understood more the pressures the Israeli prime minister has."
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