While critics contend that violent video games can turn kids into tiny terrors, some government agencies and nonprofit groups want to harness the joystick to help churn out model citizens.
To that end, competitions are under way that are designed to achieve such diverse goals as boosting America's profile overseas and drawing attention to genocide in Sudan.
The State Department teamed up with the USC Annenberg School for Communication to sponsor the Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games Competition, which seeks to improve America's reputation abroad.
Contestants must employ the principles of "public diplomacy" while cooking up a video-game concept from scratch or creating an original "mod" of an existing massively multiplayer online game, or MMO. The winner, who will receive a $5,000 prize, will be announced in May.
"Public diplomacy must move away from a model that has been dominated by notions of propaganda, so we are looking to virtual worlds and games as a space where people can build something productive and focus on the experience of learning, interaction and play, rather than passively absorb messages," said Douglas Thomas, an associate professor of communication at USC.
John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox and one of the competition's judges, said, "Video games offer a powerful immersive tool for teaching. All types of explicit and collateral learning can take place through games."
Another game-development competition targets college students, hoping to raise awareness of the ongoing crisis in the Sudan.
Stephen Friedman, general manager of mtvU, is using the internet and his company's 24-hour college network to call students to activism through viral video games. The company, in partnership with the Reebok Human Rights Foundation and the International Crisis Group, is focusing on the genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The Darfur Digital Activist competition drew 12 viral game submissions from colleges across the United States. More than 15,000 students have played the three finalist selections hailing from Carnegie Mellon University (Peace Games: Darfur), USC (Darfur: Play Your Part and Stop Genocide) and Digipen Institute of Technology (The Shanti Ambassadors: Crisis in Darfur).
"Genocide in the Sudan has been going on for a year and a half and it's not being reported in the news here," said Friedman. "We decided to look at viral games to spread the word. Activism is being reinvented in this medium."
The winning game will receive funding to complete its viral game, which will be launched in an effort to alert people around the world to what Friedman called "genocide in slow motion."
Meanwhile, the U.S. government is hoping to capitalize on the $12 million it invested in the America's Army game. The Army is licensing the technology to other branches of government that want to develop new training tools and applications.
For instance, North Carolina game developer Virtual Heroes is working with the JFK Special Warfare Center and School to create a virtual environment in which Green Berets can undertake role-playing exercises focused on cultural awareness, negotiation skills and adaptive thinking.
The developer is also working with experts on improvised explosive devices and convoy operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to develop virtual training applications that will allow soldiers and junior officers to anticipate and counter terrorist and insurgent tactics. The team expects to be able to compress situations that soldiers confront over several months in Iraq into several hours of training using the modified version of America's Army as the virtual classroom.
