For those of you who don’t follow global news with the same fervency you follow football or Square Enix’s latest game announcements you might not be aware that things are currently heating up in the Gaza/Israel conflict.
The ongoing conflict between Israel and the Hamas has been relatively quiet since the last major offensive in 2012, but reignited last month as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched Operation Protective Edge.
This recent endeavor has been the most controversial offensive the IDF has launched yet. On July 30, 2014 a U.N. school in Jabaliya, Gaza strip was hit by at least 10 shells from an Israeli barrage, with no Hamas targets in sight. The New York Times reports that 21 people at the school, in the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp, died from this attack which used heavy artillery not designed for precision use.
Despite the fact that Israeli officials have argued that it “is the enemy’s insistence on operating near shelters and other humanitarian sites that endangers civilians” the continued targetting of areas inside “safe zones” has the entire international community on edge.
In addition to concerns about Israel’s ethics, the campaign has also spawned a surprising amount of Gaza Conflict apps – games that, for better or worse, are based on the Gaza/Israel conflict.
Smartphone Games Like Bomb Gaza
Searching the Google Play store for “Gaza Games” will quickly provide you with more results than you could imagine.
And these are just the games that haven’t been removed. One of the more infamous Gaza conflict games, Bomb Gaza, was recently removed from the Google Play store.
Bomb Gaza allowed players to re-enact Israeli airstrikes, and offered players the opportunity to “drop bombs and avoid killing citizens” according to the now-defunct description page.
Other games have less direct messages. For instance, the goal of Gaza Hero is to turn Israeli armies into food, water, cake, and medicine for the palestinians. Defending Israel: SE focuses on using the Iron Dome system to defend Israel from an ever-increasing amount of rocket salvos from terrorist organizations.
There are as many different kinds of Gaza Conflict apps as their are opinions on the conflict itself, which raises the question: why apps, why now?
Why Apps, Why Now?
In general, the long production times of games leave studios unable to react in a timely manner to ongoing political events. Combined with a perceived lack of maturity – games are just supposed to be fun – few studios have attempted to take stands on prevalent political issues of the time.
However, the total time it takes to make an app for the Google Play store is much shorter than your average AAA game. When the Daily Beast spoke to one of Bomb Gaza’s devs he said that the “game was a joke made in 2 hours.” A couple hours is all it takes to make a game offensive enough to large demographics of people that Google will remove it from the Google Play store.
Making apps based off current events is one way for game devs to use clickbait culture to maximize profits during the short lifespan of the app.
However, while apps enjoy a shorter production cycle than most console games, they also enjoy a shorter lifespan. The average lifespan of an iTunes App Store app in the top 1000 is just 23 days. That gives an app slightly under one month to make an impact and gather the bulk of the revenue for the producers. Making apps based off current events is one way for game devs to use clickbait culture to maximize profits during the short lifespan of the app.
For developers inspired more by politics than profit, the short development time of apps enables them to quickly create what is in essence interactive propaganda. The disposability and cheap production costs of app making make it ideally suited for spreading a single message or idea in game-form.
How Effective are Apps as Propaganda?
While creating propaganda games can be a fast and cheap endeavor, the jury is still out on the efficacy of apps as propaganda. Cramming political messages into games isn’t easy to begin with, and cramming those messages into quickly produced apps can be feel like the developer is hammering his opinions into your brain with Thor’s hammer Mjolnir.
The political biases of an app or developer are evident from the get-go on an app’s homepage, meaning that many of these apps are primarily preaching to the choir when it comes to sharing political opinions.
Looking at the reviews for the game Gaza Hero demonstrates how few minds were swayed one way or the other based on their experience with the game. Several one-star reviews of the game don’t even reference the game’s mechanics, instead only reference user distaste for the game’s politics.
One user named Eric Kelly left the following negative review.
Really? I love the antisemitic tones in the game’s foundation. Crap. Don’t bother downloading unless you wish to leave a bad review.
Conversely, many people who reportedly enjoy the app have little to say about the game mechanics and primarily use their reviews to show their support of Gaza. One such review reads:
Free palestine. The future is bright for pealestine. Gaza wil be free INSHA ALLAH!!!!!
The apps are capable of promoting a single opinion or idea at the exclusion of all else, but fail to offer convincing arguments or mechanics to change the pre-existing opinions of users.
With that in mind, it’s more accurate to think of Gaza conflict games as social commentary rather than effective propaganda. The slew of Gaza apps games that hit the Google Play store in the last month will soon be rivaled by hoardes of election-themed games as we edge closer to the 2016 Presidential elections.
However, they do demonstrate just how far saturated we are in app culture…
Gaza/Israel Conflict? Yup. There’s an app for that.
