Released on iOS as Endgame:Eurasia, this would have been Endgame:Syria for iPhone/iPad.  We created Endgame:Syria back in the winter of 2012. We wanted to use games as a way of talking about news and current affairs. Our thinking was that if games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Battlefield, Company of Heroes, Commandos, Counter Strike can all talk about war and make references to the real world, then why can’t games also help us to understand it? However the App Store has guidelines about what you can and can’t cover in games and apps. Apple are happy for people to uses books as a medium for controversial topics, just not games.

We tried three times to get the games passed, making changes each time, for example we attempted to remove references to real groups and people:

But in the end we found that to get the game passed we’d have to remove any reference not only to real world groups and people, but the the country of Syria itself.  So we created Endgame:Eurasia to release the game in a form we could pass onto the App Store:

You can play the original at: bit.ly/endgamesyria.  There is a big list of all the articles that relate to the release of the game and the App Store issue here.  Also there is a longer discussion and links about responses to the game here.

Endgame Eurasia to Syria Conversion Guide

As such we had to substitute the real locations and groups for fictional ones. Here’s a handy cut out-&-keep guide to the original text for the game to help turn it back into a newsgame!

• Advisors = Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution
• Aquilonia = Libya
• Celephaïs = EU
• Eastasia = Iraq
• Elysia = Russia
• Eurasia/Disputed Area = Syria
• G’harne = Aleppo
• Kadath = France
• Lincoln Isle = Britain
• Lomar = Iran
• Militants = Mujaheddin or Hezbollah
• Oceania = Lebanon
• Opar = Qatar
• Regime = Bashir’s Government
• Sarnath = Damascus
• State Backers = Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
• State Militia = Shabiha Militia
• Tsalal = Turkey
• Tanah Masa = Saudi Arabia
• Ulthar = China
• Unistat = US
• Zothique = Venezuela

Note: All locations in this are selected at random from existing older and out of copyright sources, so any perceived link between the new location and the original is purely coincidental. Thanks, The GTN Team!

Run your own meat processing plant and ensure that its 100% beef in this fun game and irreverent comment on the speed and mechanisation of our food production processes. In ‘Cow Crusher’ you need to hit the right button to squish the cows into the right meat product to keep the quality high.  But watch out for horses in the works – too many horses in the mix and you’ll get shut-down!  It’s all cow, all the way in Cow Crusher!

This is a game by GameTheNews.net, newsgame correspondents to planet earth and was created in around 3 days.  Join us on Facebook and Twitter!

Climate Defense is a Tower Defense game around the issue of climate change made in just 1 week. It is free to download from Google Play. On the 1st January 2013, the Kyoto Protocol, mired in the bickering of nation states, ended. Yet climate change goes ever onwards, “We’re talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn’t care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable. … It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms.” (Bill McKibben)

In Climate Defense we give you two modes of play – one is where, as with most games, we’ve moulded the game-data to make the game enjoyable (and so you can win) to play.  In the other version the game-data is moulded to better reflect reality; a reality where year after year we pump out more and more CO2.  You can play both versions and because which world you’d rather live in.  Below is a much more detailed discussion of how we’ve moulded the game-data in the real(er) version of the game, if you’re interested.

The game is free to download for Android from Google Play or you can download the .apk file directly.  Also we’ll be discussing this game and our others on Facebook and Twitter, so why not join in?

Sources & About Climate Defense

One of the difficult things for this game was deciding the end conditions as what the changes in the PPM (parts-per-million) of CO2 will be and will mean for the average global temperatures if a difficult thing to predict because there are so many variables involved.  We started with a base level of 370 PPM of CO2 at 2000 (about 57 degrees adapted from here) and decided that the end-point of the game would be a six degree rise in temperatures to 63 degrees or the date of 2100, which ever came soonest (as 63 degrees seems to be the point at which civilisation collapses).  The game models 63 degrees as being a PPM of 950 (Figure 5 graph here). There is no simple linear relationship between PPM and temperature (as can be seen here and here) however for the constraints of development time to make it a game, we had to assume a more linear relationship than in nature.  In this we opted for +100PPM meaning +1 degree rise (which matches the rough 0.25 degree per 20 PPM seen here).

In terms of absorbing CO2, it seems that the natural world as is takes in about 0.01 ppm/year (much less than what we put out.) Yes there are other greenhouses gasses but none are a long-lived in the atmosphere nor as potent at trapping heat as CO2.  In regard to the the impacts the game gives you, we used this New Scientist article for the 1 to 5 degree results.

Tower Damage & Rate
A tower represents a group of natural carbon sinks (because we’ve not created any deliberate artificial ones yet!). The game assumes that each tower you build represents an amount of trees that will then absorb carbon from emissions of carbon dioxide, thus stopping it from ending up in the atmosphere and adding to the PPM of CO2 already there.

As you will see from the game, you’re just building (growing!) leavers, fruit and blossoms on a single tree.  This tree represents the role plant life plays in absorbing CO2. Basic towers represent the actions  of an older tree. These as the least efficient absorbers of CO2 having reached a steady state. Medium towers are middle-aged trees, these are average absorbers of CO2. Heavy towers are young trees, which are the best type of absorbers of CO2 as they grow they absorb lots. Note that this is a very simplified  view as different species grow better in different climates and impact on the amount of CO2 absorbed per year in different ways.

You can build 10 towers maximum in the game. If we assume there are 32 billion hectares of land that can be used to grow trees on, then in this game you are able to double that natural CO2 sink.  Each ‘tower’ represents 1945.6 billion trees (at 608 trees per hectare). This number of trees will absorb around 3891.2 billion Kilograms of Carbon from the atmosphere, or 3.891 million tonnes of CO2. This means each tower can  absorb a tenth of that, so 0.3891 million tonnes, or in terms of PPM, each tower can absorb about a 750th of a PPM per year so as each wave is 5 years then each tower can absorb 1/150th of a PPM.

Because we are mapping this to a Tower Defense game, we’re making it so that the trees (towers) only absorb CO2 when it is in range of them and that this absorption is at a set time/rate. To be fair to the trees, we’re boosting the absorption rate (‘damage’)  to show that they are doing more absorbing work overall.

Costs
If we assume it costs $4000 to plant a hectare of trees, then each tree costs $6.6 to plant. So a typical tower represents 1945.6 billion trees at a cost of 12840 $Billion to develop.  We’ve assumed that this can be made much more cost effective and scaled it down to 10000, 15000 or 20000 $Billion per tower.

The money situation is also reflected in the amount of money you get per enemy unit ‘killed’ i.e. absorbed. If we assume that per tonne of carbon the cost is $20 (a mid-point of the European carbon trading scheme price) and as the PPM that an enemy represents an addition of say 20PPM for all 10 enemy unit for that 5 years,  Which means that 1 PPM is 291,758,181 tonnes of carbon, therefore each unit stopped is about 2PPM so giving 11 $Billion of income.

Enemy Units (CO2)
In this game the enemy units you need to stop are clouds of CO2. Ok, so CO2 does not float around as a cloud, that is something we’ve kept from the Tower Defense genre for the sake of the game, however what is accurate is that if the CO2 emitted by human activity is not intercepted then it adds to the PPM of the atmosphere, so trapping heat. Each wave of the ‘real’ version of the game has 10 enemy units. Each enemy unit, if not stopped, represents a tenth of the additions to the PPM of the atmosphere in that 5 years the wave covers. We got this figure by measuring the difference between PPM of 2010 and 2011 and looking at the carbon emissions, it seems a rough calculation is that a change of 1 PPM comes from 291,758,181 metric tones of C02. So each enemy, if it gets past your defences, adds one tenth of that as PPM to the total. We’ve started the game in 2000 and taken it up to 2100 where the PPM can reach 950 and each level has that growth in PPM into the stats.

Emissions
You can try to tackle the problems at the emissions end also.  For this you can lower the rate of emissions.  In terms of cost, one estimate suggested it would cost 4% of GDP to cut to 1990 levels, so applied to the world, is 2,798 $Billion (at current GDP).  Because in the game, the benefit stays with you and is not a per-year cost, we’ve lowered the PPM impact to better reflect this and you have three options to implement a cut based on spending 3000, 2000 or 1000 $Billion spend to lower emissions by lowering the ‘health’ of the clouds of pollution by 30,20 or 10%.

Upgrades
This game has other global actions you can do. These represent improving the efficiency of how we use energy, so cutting demand.  If we look at efficiency there are two upgrades in the game.  These are represented by 12% cut in ‘speed’ of the enemy units (transport efficiency) or ‘spawn rate’ (industrial efficiency) of units and is estimated to cost the whole 100 $Billion budget that was put aside to help developing countries adapt for either (figures taken from this report).

Other Sources
For Climate Defense we got our data from a number of sources the main ones being the US based; National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Environmental Protection Agency plus 350.org, CO2Now.org & New Scientist.

Thanks
Thanks also to Ashley Gwinnell - our guest developer for the week!  Thanks also to all the scientists and others who contributed to the data we used to create the game.

How long will you spend picking cotton in this exploration of child labor in Uzbekistan?

This game comes originally from a news article on the Guardian website that reported on the scandal of cotton picking by kids in Uzbekistan that are used to make clothes, supplied to people in the west. This is about forced labor – the kids are taken out of school and forced to work:

Uzbekistan, one of the world’s largest exporters of cotton, forces adults and children as young as nine to pick cotton under what the charity Anti-Slavery International describes as “appalling conditions”. 

The kids are given quotas per day to meet (up to 50kg) and if they don’t meet these can be punished. To compound it all, Uzbekistan has an appalling human rights record, according to Human Rights Watch. We also looked at this article on the BBC and this video on RFERL.org. This is from Anti-Slavery campaign’s website (used as a source for the research):

The government of Uzbekistan closes down schools across the country and children, teachers and other workers are forced to work on the cotton fields with little or no pay. Each child is given a daily quota and can collect up to 50kg of cotton a day. Children who fail to pick enough cotton or those who pick low-quality cotton are punished with beatings, detention or told that their grades will suffer. Children who run away from the cotton fields, or who refuse to work, are threatened with being expelled from school.

So what we wanted to do with this game was to give a glimpse into the monotony of that job – something you as the player can end any time, unlike most of the people forced to do this work. However you can take action!

Find out more & take action!

• Support the Cotton Crimes campaign
• Cotton Campaign
• Labor Rights

Can you help our puzzling revolutionary hero burrow into the hen house to free all of zee French Hens from the farmer?

Puzzling seasonal fun! Inspired by the line “Three French Hens” from the popular rhyme of ‘The 12 Days of Christmas‘ we have created a merry little puzzle game. In Free ze French Hens, you need to burrow your way into the hen house to free your colleagues from the evil farmer. In this fun race against time, you’ll need to figure out how to burrow though the earth – avoiding the obstacles, before the time is up. A puzzling, action-packed game of festive fun for all to enjoy. If you had fun playing this game, also see our other free seasonal offering, ‘Twin Calling Birds’.

Twin Calling Birds is a free fun action game where the player must help the super-fast calling birds escape from the factory!

Super-fast seasonal fun!  Inspired by the line “Two Calling Birds” from the popular rhyme of ‘The 12 Days of Christmas‘ we have created a merry little action game.  The two Calling Birds, twins are trying to get out of the toy factory in time for Christmas and they need your help.  Control one of the twins as it jumps and flies, avoiding the obstacles to see how long it can keep going before the packing machine gets it.  See if you can beat your family and friends high scores on this slice of festive fun for all to enjoy.  If you enjoy this game, also see our other free seasonal offering, ‘Free the French Hens’.

I’ve had to think a lot about the relationship between games and war as we’ve just launched a news-game about the war in Syria. This is tough as most games steer clear of recognisable current events. Look at the débâcle of Six Days in Fallujah, announced in 2009 when the Iraq war was still very real indeed. It soon sailed into a storm of protest and has yet to emerge from this. Its easy to do a WW2 game as the Nazis make great villains and everyone likes shooting 1940s fascists. So does that mean there is an invisible line we can’t cross that other media forms – the written word, video, audio and photography – don’t need to worry about? I don’t think so. Games, with their connotations of fun and frivolity seem the opposite of how we should cover a live conflict. Comics have that connotation too. Then pioneers like Joe Sacco and his amazing works such as ‘Palestine’ covered war from a different perspective to other media and showed clearly that it is not the medium that is the issue, but what you do with it. …

In trying to do this you face the question; why use games for this at all? Games won’t (nor should they) replace traditional news forms, but they can offer something new. Firstly as they allow the user to interact with the flow of events, they are a great way to explore a dynamic situation with multiple outcomes as they let the user explore many paths in different ways. Secondly they are a medium that many people relate to as a primary media form. This means that for many people games are the ‘natural’ frame they use to understand the world around them. For these reasons I think it is worth exploring games and news and why we’ve chosen to make a game about the war in Syria.

So to explore more of the sources I used in the design of the game, I started off with Wikipedia. I know there are people who look down on it as a source, and we didn’t use it as a primary source, but it is great way to get an introduction to a subject and then fan out from that to find more. I started with the Syrian Civil War page and also used the Kurdistan page (as that had lots of crossover) – the relationship between the various Kurdish groups and the civil war is a good example of the complexity of the situation. The Wikipedia page also lists the groups who line-up on each side and I used this as a basis for the various units within the game. The design for the game really started with the possible end-points of the conflict. What was clear in reading around the subject was that this was a war with many outside forces having a keen interest in the outcome of the conflict. This article by Foreign Policy looked at who stands to win and lose by this conflict. This article (as did this one) mapped out the possible outcomes for the conflict and that got me thinking about how a game could be used to map the paths that might end up at each of these points. So from the endings I set about building a design that would show how the political and military conflict would play out to these possible endings. Then of course there is the issue of WMDs…

Mapping the Forces
In following the news about the event it was clear that there were two ongoing tracks of activity – the political and the military. We opted to make the game start around the time we built it (week 90 of the uprising) by which time it was clear that peaceful protest was almost gone and only war and international diplomacy remained as options, as this article explored:

[Protesters who became rebel fighters] got out, they saw firsthand what the regime was doing, and felt that the only way to beat the regime was to pick up a gun and fight back using violence And the third sense is the feeling that, generally speaking, peaceful protests haven’t achieved what they wanted to do. In the beginning, it was very much obviously about peaceful demonstrations, these were the cornerstone of the revolution. And I think that certainly, there’s revolt fatigue amongst protestors. I see a lot of frustration among people trying to maintain peaceful protests, other kinds of non-violent dissidence against the government. They find it really difficult to cajole other people who are unhappy with the regime, who may have participated in protests in the first six to twelve months [to come out]. They find it difficult to get their former fellow protestors to come out on the streets again because they feel that’s there’s no sense to it when the regime uses guns.

So I wanted the game to give a sense that there are a wide range of interested parties in this conflict. So we have the Free Syria Army (FSA) and the regime’s forces but there are also other groups; Palestinians on each side of the conflict. Kurds had been involved in the early days of protest and as the conflict changed into a military one, as they were often already at odds with the regime, saw an opportunity for further freedom and so took it (but there were also clashes with FSA units too). In terms of other countries’ involvement, many strongly suspected that Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah were also militarily committed to the regime side too. Politically, China, Iran and Russia were supporters of the regime to varying degrees and arms flowed from the latter two. Russia also has a military base in Syria and sees this as a strategic location it wants to hang on to. Iraq has been trying to stay out (but has also been involved) in the conflict. On the other side, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, US, UK, Turkey and France were giving political and varying degrees of logistical support to the rebels (which can often backfire). Turkey was key here as it shared a border with Syria. We wanted the political and military actions in the game to reflect these international forces so the player comes away with a sense of just how complex the conflict is. Added to that each military unit you deply comes with costs; at the end of the game, even if the war is won, there may be negative costs. The chances of these grow with certain types of unit, for example assassination as a tool is powerful but can have blowback. Islamic militias are often composed of experienced fighters, but they may wish to tread a different path from other rebels. In many ways these are the choices at the heart of the design and the point of the game; if your side is facing defeat and the only option to fight back is these more extreme actions, would you use them?

Civilian Casualties
We also wanted to include a sense of how the civilians fare in all this – most military actions cost innocent lives, on both sides. The player is faced at the end of each round of fighting with the growing civilian death toll. You can’t escape this number rising, and the more powerful the military forces deployed (on both sides) the more people die. This was also a crucial design decision of the game; to not background the consequences of military actions. In addition to this mechanic in the game we also embedded a second one; so as well as the ongoing toll of deaths, there is the chance that a military action will result in another serious calamity. Again this applies to both sides and reflects how military actions have an overspill, intentional or not.

Daily & Other Sources
While making the game I wanted to keep in touch with events as they happened. For this my main sources where: Syria Deeply (who also have excellent guides to events and people there) the Guardian Live blogs and Joshua Landis’s blog Syria Comment. Also really helpful and informative were Wired’s excellent Danger Room, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting and Juan Cole’s blog Informed Comment. Looking from different perspectives were Russia Today and Al-Jazeera as well as Adam Curtis’s blog.

…and Thanks
So a big thanks to all the sources – as well as combatants and civilians, reporters are being killed to inform us of events in Syria. If you want to help people over in Syria, then here is a good place to start. Plus the game itself is here.

Help the South African Army stop poachers from killing rhinos over the vast plains of Africa in this gamified take on news.

This game was the final one we made for our month long (Nov 2012) project of gamifying Wired.co.uk’s news. We’d looked at smart roads, SpaceX’s rocket testing, nomad planets and for this final game we’ve explored the story of how the South African army is being deployed to fight poaching. In this game we wanted to explore the size of the land that needs to be covered to protect the rhino, yet also inject some gameplay into proceedings. We’ve done this via a homage of a classic old-school game; Cabal!

(This game was originally featured on Wired)

“…not only a brave initiative [but] a great game..” AppsZoom.com - Endgame Syria is a free interactive exploration of the ongoing civil war.  Can you make the choices to win peace as well as war?

Updated! Version 2.1 is now on PC, Mac and Android. Version 1.2 is available to play here as HTML5 and on Facebook (note if you downloaded the previous version, for technical reasons we’re not able to update that version, so you’ll need to install the new version v2.1 and delete the old version 1.0, sorry, our bad!)  We did try to get the game on to iPhone/iPad too, and managed, sort of…as Endgame:Eurasia.

Endgame Syria is a free interactive exploration of events unfolding in Syria today. It is a news-game; a simulation that uses interactivity to explore a real world event. It is available for free on iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and is also on Android or as a HTML5 game  (see above for links).  You can also get the game for free on PC via Desura, GameJolt, IndieCity & Indievania.

Developed in around two weeks, the game allows users to explore the options open to the Syrian rebels as they push the conflict to its endgame. Each choice the user makes has consequences – the types of military units you may deploy, the political paths you choose to tread. Not only does each choice impact the current situation but your choices may also impact the final outcome. Users can play and replay events to see how different choices on the ground might lead to different outcomes. (You can see our sources for the game here.)

Will you choose to accept peace at any cost? What if the war goes badly and the only options left mean more extreme actions; would you agree to follow this path? Can you win the war and the peace that follows? Find out in Endgame Syria.

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Can you guide the orphan planet CFBDSIR2149 though the depths of space, avoiding bad suns and black holes to its destiny in this fun game?

Inspired by the Wired.co.uk story on the discovery of the first nomad planet – a planet roaming space without a sun — we thought of the indie game hit Thomas Was Alone (Steam link) and wanted to pay homage to that as we realised that this nomad planet, CFBDSIR2149, was alone too. So we built a game that looks at the phenomena and follows the story of CFBDSIR2149′s future and the search to find something worth orbiting.

(This game was originally featured on Wired)