Video Game World Gives Peace a Chance

"It would just have one feature," he said, " live democracy. See what it's like when issues get resolved through peaceful voting and transition of power.

"Games give you the opportunity to live a culture and I think that is dramatically more powerful and persuasive than a million leaflets or 60,000 Peace Corps volunteers."

A State Department official said the agency doesn't have plans to make such an investment.

"We are not generally a source of funding for experimental technology," said Jeremy Curtin, senior adviser to the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. "But we are very interested in what the private sector is doing in terms of creative use of technologies."

USC professors Joshua Fouts and Douglas Thomas, the organizers of that school's contest, have discussed the project with State Department officials and hope to get a policymaker on their judging panel. The contest winner will be announced on the eve of a video game industry conference in Los Angeles next year.

The two said their contest was inspired by playing and exploring the virtual world of an online game called Star Wars Galaxies, which lets players around the world log on and participate in the universe of the "Star Wars" movies. They found that many players from other countries had a negative view of Americans, an impression that sometimes became more positive as they played cooperatively with players based in the United States.

"It's a virtual exchange program," said Fouts, who worked at Voice of America for six years before becoming the director of USC's Center on Public Diplomacy.

The biggest challenge for programmers entering the contest might be one that policymakers and activists have never had to think about: The game will have to be fun. After all, the loftiest and most educational game in the world won't have much positive result if nobody plays it.

David Tucker, a computer science major at the University of Maryland who hopes to land a job in game design, said he didn't know whether he'd want to play such a game or not. "I guess it would depend on the quality of the game," he said. "I know I have played games that don't have violence but are enjoyable." After a short pause, he added, "I can't think of any at the moment."

"If you write a boring book and people stop on page two, it has no impact," said Jesse H. Ausubel, a director at the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, which provided $125,000 in funds to sponsor USC's contest.

Is democracy "fun"? Castronova thinks aspiring game designers should have more than enough to work with for such a project. "You could look at the U.S. Constitution as a big game," he said. "We've been playing it for 200 years. And we love it."