Playing Public Diplomacy Games

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The U.S. State Department [6] and the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication are co-sponsoring a "Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games Competition, which seeks to improve America's reputation abroad," reports Wired magazine. "Contestants must employ the principles of 'public diplomacy [7]' while cooking up a video-game concept from scratch or creating an original 'mod' of an existing massively multiplayer online game." USC professor Douglas Thomas said, "Public diplomacy must move away from a model that has been dominated by notions of propaganda [8], so we are looking to virtual worlds and games as a space where people can build something productive and focus on the experience of learning, interaction and play." The U.S. government is also "licensing the technology" behind the America's Army [9] game, which cost $12 million to produce. New versions will stress "cultural awareness, negotiation skills and adaptive thinking," or help soldiers "anticipate and counter terrorist and insurgent tactics."