Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Israeli Anti-Settlement Game

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Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Israeli Anti-Settlement Game

by Ian Bogost June 17, 2005

categories: Political Games

An Israeli anti-settlement group has launched Wild West Bank, a game intended to underscore the problems of Israeli occupation in Palestinian land. The game uses the theme of the American Wild West to demonstrate the continued promulgation of settlements in the West Bank despite official government withdrawl. The game is entirely in Hebrew, so I'm relying on this BBC article for a description:

In the game, the player acts as a sheriff tasked with dismantling illegal settlement outposts before they get turned into fully-fledged settlements ringed by Israeli soldiers. As soldiers are taken away from the occupied territories, they greet their return to Israel with a "yeah". But as more and more settlements and roads appear, the Palestinians who populate the playing area become boxed in. At the end of play, a message reads: "Thousands of Israelis and Palestinianians have lost their lives as a result of the occupation. The occupation is not a game."

Zach over at Academic Gamers has also posted a detailed impression of the game.

The game play is simple and the visuals are both stark and cartoonish, setting up an effective juxtaposition between the effort of play and the subject at hand, and offering an effective way to caricature the settlers, soldiers, and Palestinians. As Zach points out, the gameplay is essentially whack-a-mole. As Paulo pointed out to Gonzalo and me, the game seems to use what we often call the rhetoric of failure. You don't seem to be able to win the game, perhaps underscoring the gravity of the problem in the region. Gonzalo's Newsgaming.com game September 12 also employed a rhetoric of failure of sorts, and some people thought Madrid did as well, although that wasn't the case.

The game was created by a coalition of organizations calling themselves Back to Israel. They describe the goal of the game to be raised awareness about continued construction in the West Bank, and advocacy to persuade Israeli's to support dismantling settlements.

According to the creators, the game has had 45,000 plays in the last four days. It is a simple game but I think an important one.

(thanks to Michael Rand and Paolo and others who pointed this out)