Bridging Cultural Gaps Through Gaming

By Ed Martinez

October 5, 2009

The State Department is sponsoring an outreach program through gaming intended to help people in the Middle East improve their English skills and also learn about American history and culture.

Over the past several months, a free cell phone game called X-Life has attracted about 1,800 players not just from abroad, but from the U.S., and is making it possible for them to share ideas of tolerance and respect for each other’s culture.

“This is public diplomacy that we are experiencing,” said Ali Reza Manouchehri, CEO of MetroStar Systems, the San Diego-based company that designed X-Life. “This is rebuilding trust with what we call our adversaries, or people that don’t have the same understanding.”

In 2008, MetroStar was awarded a contract to design the first mobile application geared towards public diplomacy. According to Manouchehri, their approach was to engage the “millennial” generation, which were individuals born between 1981 and 2000.

X-Life in action, showing avatar-based characters learning about the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to solve a mystery.

X-Life reaches communities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria and Iran. “The content that we focus on is always very open. It’s focused on distributing content ... it could be civil rights, a speech that President Obama did, or Secretary Clinton did. We turn the content into something more engaging—so it is not just a speech anymore. We turn content to trivia, puzzle and gaming. We challenge the users ... what did they learn from the speech? We try to see at a macro level what the behaviors of people are ... to see if they really understood what the President’s message was,” said Manouchehri.

MetroStar captures the data from the users, whether it’s positive or negative, and is then shared with our State. The data gathered could be used to assess public sentiment in the Middle East.

Manouchehri believes that developing countries are becoming heavy mobile phone users and the X-Life is a good way to reach their population. He hopes that by exposing the youth to American history and culture, it can help influence relations between both worlds.