Teyon, a Polish video game developer and producer from Krakow, has recently released a new arcade on-rails shooter "Heavy Fire: Special Operations" for Nintendo's WiiWare. Taking place during a fictional conflict in Somalia with the aim to shoot "rebels who spread terror and fear," the game has already caused controversies among video game players and reviewers, criticizing it for reinforcing stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims.

New trailer for video game Spec Ops: The Line was presented recently at E3 Expo 2010, six months after releasing the announcement trailer. The narrative-driven third person shooter video game placed in sand-buried Dubai is being developed by Yager Development and published by 2K Games. The plot is inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now. It is to be released in winter 2010/2011, coming on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC platforms.

This project is focused on the analysis of the everyday digital literacy practices of Moroccan and Turkish immigrant youth in the Netherlands. While the past several years have seen an increasing amount of research on the digital literacy practices of youth, within and well beyond the Netherlands, relatively little of this work to date has focused on immigrant youth and their productions and interpretations of social media (e.g. web logs, Hyves, YouTube, texting, Twitter, gaming).

While the video game industry is usually willing to court controversy when the potential payoff is worth it, concepts of spirituality and faith have generally been avoided by both developers and publishers. In fact, religion seems to be such a taboo subject to include in video games that the only type of faith that really appears in titles here in the US is Christianity. Even then, the subject is often poorly addressed in games that are themselves poorly made. But why is it that religious content is so sparse in the realm of video games? The reasons are largely based on contention between religious and industry leaders, as well as the fact that you'll rarely find a topic as personal as faith.

This article explores the ways in which Palestine is envisioned, and its representation constructed, in contemporary video games. At the same time, capitalizing on Bogost’s notion of “procedurality”, this article discusses the potential and limitations of various game genres for modeling complex historical, social, and political realities. It focuses particularly on the ways in which the Arab-Israeli conflict is mediated and its perception and evaluation subsequently shaped by these games. By doing so, this article analyzes how the (re)constructions of reality as provided by the video games’ graphical, textual, and procedural logic, serve parallel – albeit contradictory – political and ideological interpretations of real-world events. On a more general level, this article aims to further develop the game genres’ critique by focusing on two contrasting, but equally signifi cant and simultaneous, aspects of video games – the persuasive power of procedurality and the inherent limitations thereof.