Gaming for peace!

The world of gaming is certainly not all first-person shooters. An online game that was released by the UN's World Food Programme last spring - "Food Force," "in which players must figure out how to feed thousands of people on a fictitious island" - has been downloaded 2 million times, the Washington Post reports. That's half the number of players claimed by the world's most popular online game, World of Warcraft." And FF is not the only game project about "saving the world through peace and democracy." The Post points to "PeaceMaker," a game being developed at Carnegie Mellon University in which "you win by negotiating peace between Israelis and Palestinians"; the University of Southern California's just-launched competition "to develop a game that promotes international goodwill toward the United States"; and an MTV contest to come up with a videogame that fights genocide in Darfur, Sudan.