An Israeli anti-settlement group has launched Wild West Bank, a game intended to underscore the problems of Israeli occupation in Palestinian land. The game uses the theme of the American Wild West to demonstrate the continued promulgation of settlements in the West Bank despite official government withdrawl. The game is entirely in Hebrew, so I'm relying on this BBC article for a description:

Zach over at Academic Gamers has also posted a detailed impression of the game.

The game play is simple and the visuals are both stark and cartoonish, setting up an effective juxtaposition between the effort of play and the subject at hand, and offering an effective way to caricature the settlers, soldiers, and Palestinians. As Zach points out, the gameplay is essentially whack-a-mole. As Paulo pointed out to Gonzalo and me, the game seems to use what we often call the rhetoric of failure. You don't seem to be able to win the game, perhaps underscoring the gravity of the problem in the region. Gonzalo's Newsgaming.com game September 12 also employed a rhetoric of failure of sorts, and some people thought Madrid did as well, although that wasn't the case.

The game was created by a coalition of organizations calling themselves Back to Israel. They describe the goal of the game to be raised awareness about continued construction in the West Bank, and advocacy to persuade Israeli's to support dismantling settlements.

According to the creators, the game has had 45,000 plays in the last four days. It is a simple game but I think an important one.

(thanks to Michael Rand and Paolo and others who pointed this out)

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