I must admit, I was stressed out. Hundreds of people had signed a petition calling for my resignation. The United Nations claimed the refugee camps were in a deplorable state. The right was planning massive demonstrations against police brutality following a wave of arrests I had ordered, targeting settler leaders.

Hamas and its cohorts were giving me no peace, either: One day the security officer of a settlement was killed by a Palestinian near the separation fence.

Suddenly, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's position seemed more understandable to me. Even a political acrobat would have difficulty functioning in the morass of the Middle East.
 
 But I was doing so virtually, via a computer game. Poor Olmert deals with reality.

The far-from-simple challenges facing the Israeli prime minister are presented by Asi Burak and Eric Brown, a pair of young Israeli entrepreneurs who have developed PeaceMaker, one of the most intriguing games in recent memory.

The recently released game allows players to assume the role of Israel's prime minister or chairman of the Palestinian Authority. The goal: to bring about peace.

After two hours of playing PeaceMaker, however, it is clear that this is no simple task. If you withdraw from the territories and unilaterally declare a Palestinian state, you will lose the support of the Israeli public. If you lash out at the Palestinians, initiating targeted assassinations, arrests and curfews, the Palestinians will rebel and start a third intifada. If you can stay in the game long enough and make the right decisions, however, you will win the ultimate trophy - the Nobel Peace Prize.

Even if you play the PA chairman, you will realize that reality is far more complex than it seems from the news broadcasts. The militant organizations are not willing to give up the armed struggle easily. On the other hand, the UN, Israel and the United States will pressure you into making concessions and taking steps toward peace.

PeaceMaker was born when Burak and Brown were preparing their final project in the master's degree program in technology and entertainment at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Senseless war games

"The idea for a game was conceived when I realized I could do something without restrictions," explains Burak. "We saw that the video and computer game industry was gaining popularity, but that the adult community still views it as a medium full of stupid, superficial and violent content. We wanted to try an experiment to shatter that consensus, to show that it is possible to design much more than just sports or senseless war games, to try to make people understand reality via a computer game."

The game developed slowly and demo version player reactions began arriving from around the world. Even the American media showed an interest. Burak and Brown were interviewed by a host of newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times.

They were invited to speak at various forums, including in Qatar, where Burak and Brown found themselves explaining their game to a group of Arab students from all over the Arab world.

The positive feedback from the Arab students was thanks to the goal of creating a Palestinian state. They had never encountered anyone before who presented their perspective. And as they played the Israeli side, they learned it, too, was not so simple. One student bombed the Hamas infrastructure after a suicide attack, because he was angry, but that did nothing to further peace.

"I think this is a game for anyone who reads the news and is interested in what is happening," says Burak.

Burak stresses that the game's purpose is to demonstrate and explain the situation in the Middle East to the Americans and the Europeans, and to show the Israelis and the Palestinians what the other side looks like.

"At first, people always play their own side, but only when the Arab students in Qatar played the Israeli prime minister did they understand the other side," says Burak. "It revolutionized their thought processes. After the game, we had a discussion, and suddenly they were speaking differently."

After completing their studies, Burak and Brown fine-tuned the game into a finished product for commercial release. They also began founding their startup company, ImpactGames, which has so far raised $500,000 from private investors and an incubator in Pittsburg that invests in small businesses. They started it in 2005.

The game costs $19.95 and a short demo version can be downloaded. The game has already sold thousands of copies in about 50 different countries. ImpactGames' vision is to create games similar to PeaceMaker for other conflicts around the world, and to have the games added to the content at news Web sites.

One of the future goals is to have the games updated with real-time news footage. That way, readers could play the games and gain a deeper understanding of what is happening.