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archive: Wafaa Bilal's political game censored.
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We've written before about Wafaa Bilal's piece Domestic Tension. His new work, Night of Bush Hunting, has come under significant antagonism.
Tom Sherman, of Syracuse University writes:
Iraqi-born Chicago-based artist Wafaa Bilal interviewed after his show called Virtual Jihadi at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was "suspended" and he was shut out of the arts building. The art piece consists of a hacked video Al Qaeda video game called Night of Bush Hunting. The artist inserted himself as a virtual suicide bomber as a way of referencing his own anger and despair over his brother and father's death during the American occupation as well as the anger and despair of Iraqis who have lost control of their lives.
YouTube has a few interviews that will help get you up to speed on the issue.
It seems however that things have recently turned even worse for Wafaa. To cite an article at GamePolitics.
"Following his RPI expulsion, Bilal's Virtual Jihadi exhibit was moved to the nearby Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy. On Monday night, a local Republican political figure, Robert Mirch, led a
protest against Bilal's work outside the Sanctuary. Mirch, by the way, also happens to be the Public Works Commissioner for the city of Troy. In that capacity, he is responsible for enforcing building codes."
Many thanks to Tom and Christian McCrea for the updates, found on the Empyre list.
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archive: New submission: Domestic Tension.
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Anonymous writes:
For the duration of May, 2007, Iraqi born artist Wafaa Bilal will live in the FlatFile Galleries in Chicago. The public can watch him 24 hours a day over a live webcam; and if they choose, visitors to his website can shoot him with a remote controlled paintball gun.
Bilal’s self imposed confinement is designed to raise awareness about the life of the Iraqi people and the home confinement they face due to the both the violent and the virtual war they face on a daily basis.
You can participate - eg shoot at him with a paintball gun - by clicking here.
See this site for some videos and more about the Wafaa's work. Good stuff.
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archive: War On Terror - The Board Game
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 The best way a left-wing political activist can explain to their family who the real terrorists are is to enact a subversive demonstration whilst every one is having too much fun to notice.
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La Petite Claudine pointed me to a blog entry by Ed Halter (author of the book "From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games" which I haven't read but have bought) covering the not-so-small controversy of a new mod by 'The Global Islamic Media Front" 'provocatively' titled "A Night Of Bush Capturing".
Of particular note is that the game they modded was called Quest For Saddam which, as La Petite points out, is widely considered a perfectly upstanding example of good old fashioned American family values.. perhaps ever so slightly coloured with belly-warming patriotic feeling. The ESRB rating for QFS is Mature for Blood, Mature Humor, Violence. 'Mature humour' as in Benny Hill ..? No, probably not.
Here we have a great example of a political battle being fought in the game-code itself; while the mod inverts, or returns, the message of a prior game, it was clearly important to the makers that they drive the point home by also inverting the medium of that message. It would seem the videogame division of the pro-US propaganda effort is being fed a little of it's own medicine. Interesting times ahead..
Because Ed Halter's blog is so excellent, we've added it to our link tree.
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As yet unreleased, but topical nonetheless: "PeaceMaker is a one-player game in which the player can choose to take the role of either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President. The player must react to in-game events, from diplomatic negotiations to military attacks, and interact with eight other political leaders and social groups in order to establish a stable resolution to the conflict before his or her term in office ends."
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archive: This just in: Play the News
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(Via AG) KumaWar build playable
re-creations of real war events, with Assault
on Iran their latest free download. As Zach from AG points out, they're
following Gonzalo Frasca's call to "play the news", although motives
(and lessons) are a little thin. They're also recreating
real stories from submitted missions.
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archive: The Making Of The Balkan Wars: The Game
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Personal Cinema.
Museum of the City of Skopje
From the 27th until the 30th of May the multimedia project 'The Making of Balkan Wars: the game' will be hosted in the premises of the City Museum of Skopje. A network of computers will allow visitors to view the multiplayer video game „Balkan Mall‰, participate actively in it and interact with each other. Parts of the project as video works and video games will also be exhibited individually within the exhibition space.
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Robert Praxmarer
http://www.servus.at/cubic/(t)error.htm
Seriously some people are too good. This political game was commissioned by ars electronica and then deemed too controversial to be shown!!
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Rafael Fajardo
http://www.du.edu/~rfajardo/juego/index.html
Explores the complexity of the real-world US/Mexico border
situation. The games depict border
crossings from the point of view of the illegal immigrant, and as a border
patrol agent who attempts to prevent the crossing.
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http://www.tropicalamerica.com
On Ramp Arts. 2002.us
Explores the history of Latin America; suitably illustrating the cause and effect erasure of history through non-linear, interactive narrative.
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http://escapefromwoomera.com/ Escape From Woomera is a subversive game which responded to the history of "life within this most secretive and controversial place on the Australian political and geographic landscape". Escape From Woomera recreates the now-closed Woomera Detention Centre wihch was, at its peak, 'home' to 1400 illegal immigrants who awaited processing for periods of up to two years, in conditions which were so poor as to receive condemnation from the United Nations. A Federal Government media lockdown on Woomera, and its placement in the remote, South Australian outback ensured that Australians remained oblivious to the inhumane conditions. In 2002, reports of abuse and a hunger strike by 150 of the asylum seekers provoked a mass protest outside the centre - during which 50 detainees escaped.
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For those of you beyond the remote shores of Australia, Donkey John may not speak in the rapturously humourous tones it does to those even slightly left of the right in Australia. So if the likeness doesn't ring home, just picture your standard, conservative, national leader throwing any global, political weight he can muster at one of the world's poorest countries, in order to claim rights to a sea shelf rich in billions of dollars worth of oil, whilst the tiny, island nation who according to the International Court of Justice should have full rights to the water in which this oil sits, struggles to recover from its recently terminated 27 year occupation by a brutal military dictatorship.
http://www.donkeyjohn.com/donkeyjohn/
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archive: Bordergames - Decompressing Lavapies
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While in Madrid I'm catching up with this interesting bunch to talk over a project of theirs currently in development.
Both game and workshop toolkit, 'Bordergames' is an attempt to provide a forum for young immigrants in the area to review and nurture their socio-political environment using a virtual reconstruction of Lavapies, their local square.
In this way the Bordergames crew are making both a site and player-specific game; transforming Lavapies into an in-game 'stage' for exploring scenarios and sharing information that strengthens the sense of community in their local environment.
FYI The engine they chose is the open-source and portable Crystal Space with all modelling done in the powerful Blender.
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archive: New Submission - StreamWars
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Anonymous writes "
Online/Network Multiplayer 3D videogame in wich each player is invited to choose a character and navigate in a hijacked-videogame environment , in sampled, vectorized and digitalized architectures, crossed and disrupted by streams of chaotic data.
http://www.streamlab.info/streamwars/
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Well, perhaps it would be a little more exciting if it wasn't a hoax, but if an entire 20thC art movement could be based on the works of artists who didn't see the point in actually realising any of their ideas, then there's probably not much point in us moving far beyond the 'concept' now - providing your imagination is actually strong enough to put yourself in the shoes of a student who decides to walk to school one day wearing a t-shirt that says 'serial killer', carrying a duffel bag laden with a 20-lb propane bomb, pipe bombs, fire bombs, molotov cocktails, a sawn-off shot gun, and a 9mm Tec-9 semi-automatic pistol, planning to kill at least 500 students, asking them before they die, whether they believe in god.
http://www.columbinepaintball.com/
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Anonymous writes "
www.mindbending.us
When it’s in the game, it’s in the brain!
Mindbending Software Inc. is a company specialised on psychological conditioning software packages for children.
With the newest technologies our products infiltrate the computer games of your kids and mingle various subconscious or concious conditiong messages and images in the game contents.
"
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archive: New entry - Eastwood Group's 'Civilization IV'
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 The Eastwood Group have created a unique project in the RTS format, one that takes an ironic turn on the geographical preoccupations of the genre's founder, Civilization.
Instead of building power stations and routing traffic, Civilization IV configures the player as an agent within the networked flows of corporate power.
At the outset, the player chooses not alignment, but employment with mega corps like IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Intel etc, and operates at an executive level within the seedy arenas of corporate interest. The game itself is a full featured real time strategy game for Wintel (which is a little hypocritical given the message), but is free for download at 241Mb.
Deleuze would've toasted to it I'm sure.
Updated: 19 November 2006
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archive: Newsgaming.com's ''September 12th'' and ''Madrid''
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 Created by Gonzalo Frasca and a team of independent games developers, Newsgaming plans to publish several each year in response to world events.
http://www.newsgaming.com/
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archive: “Rethinking Wargamesâ€: A Chance to Remaster Conflict
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Interview with Ruth Catlow by Molly Hankwitz
“Rethinking Wargames†is an online 3-Player Chess Game which
questions the politics of conflict-oriented traditional
chess. Players can change the rules and develop their own,
non-black and white images of the board itself, adding them
to the site.
To play see: http://www.low-fi.org.uk/rethinkingwargames/
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archive: New Submission - 3D game 'STOP BUSH'
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Anonymous writes "
 STOP BUSH is 90 seconds of cathartic firing accusations at an army of Bushes and Cheney attack dogs, all to the rocking beat of Rage Against the Machine.
Hypocrisy! Ignorance! Brutality!
STOP BUSH's searing satire probably won't change the world, but it could make you feel better.
STOP BUSH is only 5MB, and installs automatically. Download the setup file (Windows only) at:
http://twcdc.com/STOP_BUSH_3D_COMPUTER_GAME/"
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tech: Interview with Radwan Kasmiya of AFKARMedia
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Well that didn't take us long! The author of UnderAsh and UnderSeige, Radwan Kasmiya, talks to selectparks about AFKARMedia's challenging political games, their message and their plans for the future.
This interview will also be translated into Spanish by Marta and published on Elastico.
Thanks luv!!!
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archive: First Person(s): 'Under Seige' and The New Virtual War
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I first became aware of AFKAR Media's 'Under Ash' a couple of years ago via Kipper, while we were drawing up our own political game, Escape from Woomera. What excited us was to see a full-featured 3D game being used to distribute awareness of a situation as serious as the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Given Under Ash's content, it's also interesting that it's widely known as the first Arabic 3D Game.
The team's next project, 'Under Seige' is timely for another reason however, and questions whether games can be so clearly defined as a medium of entertainment..
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While the phenomenon of
Political Games has largely grown
from activist movements, recent months have seen the emergence of browser games made by political parties in the US designed to swerve the vote through a mixture of propagandism, humour and
habit planting.
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There isn't content right now for this block.
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Carbon Defence League and Critical Art Ensemble. 2002.us
Nintendo GameBoy ROM hack
Homepage 
