PeaceMaker Campaign Launches Tomorrow

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I'm happy to say we're launching a campaign for our client, ImpactGames, tomorrow morning. The campaign is for their first game release, PeaceMaker.

PeaceMaker is modeled around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and portrays the dynamic of the conflict very realistically, using real footage from real events. You can play as either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President. In either case, you have a number of diplomatic/political actions, construction initiatives or security measures at your disposal, and your goal is to solve the conflict by establishing a two-state solution to the conflict.

I played as the Palestinian President a couple days ago on a demo version ImpactGames sent over. For me, the value stemming from the game comes from understanding the dynamic of the conflict and how decisions will affect the stances of the various stakeholders toward you and your policies. And you can't please everybody. For example, when I played, there was simply no pleasing Hamas. No matter what I did, they hated me and what I was doing. I won't spoil the surprise by telling you how I resolved that - you'll have to play yourself. (The game costs $20, which is a lot less than I pay for games for that XBox 360 Lauren got me for Christmas.)
As far as the marketing goes, we're taking an approach that's consistent with the Conversational Marketing concepts I've been discussing here and elsewhere for the past couple years. That is, we not only want to sell games, but we also want to emphasize the value of the community that's springing up around the game. We're advertising with blogs and with news sites, and while we are advertising to drive sales, we're advertising also to drive participation in the community, specifically the blog ImpactGames set up to discuss the development of PeaceMaker and the gameplay experience.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict (IRL) is something that generates a lot of conversation across the blogosphere and online forums in general. It seems every political blogger and message board poster has their own ideas about how to solve things. We're hoping that our campaign will encourage people to play the game and discuss their experience with the game's developers and ImpactGames' founders. They all blog and they're listening to what people are saying about PeaceMaker.

If you're interested in hearing more, check out the PeaceMaker site, or read this review of PeaceMaker.

We're In

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Well, Lauren and I are in the new house. So much to do and so little time. Thankfully, lots of folks have dropped by to give us a hand, including our parents, siblings and friends. My office is set up with the bare bones - a desk (a gift from Rob), my laptop and my old desktop, and some shelves. I'm right in the middle of getting all the sound equipment I own set up in the basement. One challenge will be to string a CAT6 cable down from the router (which is in my office on the second floor) to the basement where my Mac Mini will reside. (I tried to bribe the cable guy to do it yesterday, but no dice.)

Lots of sanding, priming and painting ahead, and I see that upon closer inspection, the bathrooms need to be redone in here, particularly the floors. Most of my friends who are homeowners tell me that it's never quite "done." I guess this will be my ongoing project for at least the next several years. In the short term, I've got a bunch of rooms to paint, a broken window (!) to fix, a pool cover that needs rainwater pumped off it pronto, and light fixtures to be installed.

Needless to say, blogging will be light until the New Year.