CNET Report Quizzes Diplomacy Game Finalists

A report on CNET has detailed the four finalists for the previously SGS-covered USC Center on Public Diplomacy's Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds competition, including the previously mentioned Peacemaker, as well as Hydro Hyjinks, Exchanging Cultures, and Global Kids. According to Jean Miller, the contest's project manager at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the contest received more entries than anticipated, and as such, the contest's judges, including Seely Brown, formerly the chief scientist at Xerox PARC and currently a visiting scholar at USC's Annenberg Center, were able to pick the four quality projects from the submitted entries. While Peacemaker was built from scratch by Asi Burak and Eric Brown, two of the projects, Exchanging Cultures and Global Kids, were actually built upon the shoulders of the massively multiplayer online game Second Life. However, the Peacemaker developers are undaunted by the fact that while they chose to create a strategy game instead of taking the contest's moniker of “Virtual Worlds” as literally as other developers. "The competition was just (about) reinventing public diplomacy through game studies," commented Eric Brown. "A game world is a virtual world." More information, including more quotes from finalists and judges, can be read in the full article.