“…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.

Follow us on Twitter or Facebook to stay in the loop…

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!

This article looks at the sources we used for the game NarcoGuerra, GameTheNews.net’s look at the war on drugs. The first point to note is that by no means is this the definitive word on the issue. We’re focused on one area and one facet of that area; how the street-price is impacted by policing. That focus came from a discussion with Danny Kushlick, the Director of External Affairs at Transform Drug Policy Foundation. He talked about this ‘balloon effect’ whereby pressure on one location just results in a bubble in another.

Before we’d talked I assumed the problem was consumption of drugs, which it is in some respects, but what I didn’t realise is that the proportion of the population who use drugs has not really changed that much. Basically it seemed to me from the research that some people are going to use drugs, always have, always will, some for fun and some to escape their reality. Fighting a war against that does not seem to have worked. So I was thinking we’d do a game where the ‘reveal’ to the player was that you needed to put your resources into treatment in the places where drugs are consumed and not attack the supply end where they are produced. But this did not seem to be the case either, so while treatment is important, the basic problem is one of market forces. If the police and military do a good job of stopping drug trafficking, the supply goes down and so the price goes up. As the price goes up there is more money to be made trafficking drugs, so more criminals enter the market. As more criminals enter the market the supply goes up and so the price drops and drugs become easy to get.

Nothing would have changed except lots of tax-payer money was spent in achieving nothing the there is a human cost to the who doomed attempt Stop stop supply. What we have done in NarcoGuerra is to build a simulation of this real street-price equation and we invite the player to see how they can fare in this environment.  The War on Drugs is a global issue, given the resources we had we opted to focus on one area: Mexico – so this BBC documentary was a source of info for us:

As was this Vice film on the cartels vs Mormons was also very interesting:

Here’s a few of the sources we used in the research for the game:

• Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s Blog (and this policy paper by them)
• Counting The Costs
• UK Government’s Strategy Unit Drugs Report (2003)
• 32 Reasons Why We Need To End The War On Drugs
• War is Boring on Drugs
• The House I Live In (Doc on the war on drugs)
• Breaking the Taboo
• Stop the Violence
• Richard Branson, “War on drugs a trillion-dollar failure” (on CNN)
• Ed Vullamy on the War on Drugs

You can find the main site for the game here.