ISRAEL: Video games reflecting conflicts in the Middle East are showcased in a new exhibition in Israel

Record ID: 395872

  • Title: ISRAEL: Video games reflecting conflicts in the Middle East are showcased in a new exhibition in Israel
  • Date: 9th December 2006
  • Summary: SCREEN SHOWING PALESTINIAN GUNMAN SHOOTING AN ISRAELI SOLDIER IN THE SYRIAN GAME 'UNDER SIEGE'
  • Embargoed: 24th December 2006 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Israel
  • Country: Israel
  • Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment / Showbiz,Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
  • Reuters ID: LVACRG5SGPWUS5HF9SLY7JKJBX6Q
  • Story Text: Being a suicide bomber is only one of Everyone can be a suicide bomber in a
    new video-game exhibition in Israel. One can always hit a button in order to blow oneself up in the middle of a crowded street -- but it's only here where you can click a second time if your location was not good enough, or if the blast did not kill enough people.
    A computer flash game, simply called 'The Suicider', is one of dozens of video and computer games being presented in a new exhibition called 'Forbidden Games' that opened on Friday (December 1) in the Israeli city of Holon.
    Visitors at the Holon Centre for Visual Arts can watch and play various games dealing with conflicts in the Middle East.
    Some of the items were created by major Western companies, some by major Arab companies and some by ordinary Internet users who chose this medium to make a point.
    'The Suicider', for instance, was developed by an American teenager who said his only intention was to illustrate how stupid suicide bombers are.
    Another game called 'Under Siege' was developed by Syria's Afkar Media company, and is based on U.N. reports of events that took place in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip between 1999 and 2002.
    Since it was designed for educational purposes, the player does not have the option of carrying out suicide bombings or killing civilians. But killing Israeli soldiers as part of the game is highly desirable as the goal is to "get rid of the Israeli occupation", according to the exhibition's brochure.
    Eyal Danon, who curated the exhibition along with the centre's manager Michal Eilat said that computer games were first created in 1952 for research but have since developed into one of the most exposed mediums in the world. As such, it deserves closer inspection.
    "Video games are the second industry, entertainment industry in the U.S. today. So for sure they create, they have an effect on our world view. And what we try to do here is to try and question this world view - this kind of dichotomic world view through changing the role of the good guys and the bad guys and through exhibiting games from activist groups who question the current policies of the U.S.," said Danon in Holon.
    Danon added that computer games are a tool used by anti-American groups to challenge what they see as U.S. hegemony in standard fare that tends to portray U.S. troops as the "good guys" fighting "bad guys".
    One of these games is called 'The Night When Bush was Captured'. The players' mission is to capture U.S. President George W. Bush after first killing a lot of American soldiers.
    But one of the visitors in the exhibition was not impressed by the attempt to switch roles between the "good" and "bad" guys.
    Maria Kuzinski, a documentary editor from Ukraine, said she considers the medium a capitalist tool to dictate social norms.
    "I think everything today is just part of the capitalist machine, so it's just killing until the end while in the real life the things are absolutely not possible to be settled, so it's very ambiguous position of these games," Kuzinski said as she played a game created by an Israeli left-wing group, in which the player is asked to try to evacuate Jewish settlers from the West Bank, yet is doomed to fail.
    But Gur Yanai, an Israeli Internet designer who created a flash game about the war between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah guerillas, said he feels that this specific medium enables him to enlighten a broader crowd about reality as he perceives it.
    "It's part of the powers that I have as a game developer, as an Internet developer, is to respond to what's going on, and it's not just to make games for fun -- I mean it's making games for fun, yes that's true -- but through the fun you can also pass some messages about stuff that you believe in, about the way you see things. And sometimes people, like especially during wars they don't really see the full picture and it's not that I, I don't intend to see the full picture but I can show an aspect of the full picture at least," he said.
    In another room, a man and a child played an interactive game in which their images were shown on a huge screen. Their objective was to avoid war planes and collect money and assets. When the man tried to stop the child from playing, he replied by saying: "Kill, kill, kill."
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