The young men and women over here need to find a release from the stresses of life in a combat zone and you guys have helped them tremendously. By donating games to occupy their time you may have kept them from drinking or other stupid mistakes that could cost them their career or life.
I am not a soldier, sailor, Marine or Airman; I am a civilian contractor who has been here for close to 3 years. I am not asking you to donate games for us but would like to continue the work that Shane Neuhaus has started and be a relay point for your contributions. I will provide you with pictures and a short detail of who got the games and what they plan to do with them.

If there are any questions about the legitimacy of my intentions you are more than welcome to e-mail me ... My mailing address is listed below and I hope to hear from you guys soon.

Kevin Stewart
KBR/ LSI
APO, AE 09381

iraqgamedrive@gmail.com

From the 22nd Kevin will be away on leave till the 6th of June so please use either of the following 2 email address for any direct questions/comments in regards to the donation drive.

Micah Johnson and Stanley Hobbs is the name of Kevin's two associates who will be dealing with anything in regards to the donation while he is away on leave.
iraqgamedrive@gmail.com

Here is a list of restrictions in regards to what can be sent and proper shipping procedure to the donation APO address.

Restrictions for Zip Code 09381

A - Securities, Currency or Precious Metals Securities, currency, or precious metals in their raw, unmanufactured state are prohibited. Official shipments are exempt from this restriction.

A1 - Any Service Member Mail addressed to "Any Servicemember", or similar wording such as "Any Soldier", "Sailor", "Airman", or "Marine"; "Military Mail"; etc., is prohibited. Mail must be addressed to an individual or job title such as "Commander", "Commanding Officer", etc.

B - Form 2976-A Form 2976-A is required for all mail weighing 16 ounces or more, with exceptions noted below. In addition, mailers must properly complete required customs documentation when mailing any potentially dutiable mail addressed to an APO or FPO regardless of weight. The following are exceptions to the requirement for customs documentation on non-dutiable mail that weighs 16 ounces or more:
Known mailers are exempt from providing customs documentation on non-dutiable letters, and printed matter weighing 16 ounces or more. (A known mailer is anyone who legally applies a permit imprint to a mailpiece. Mail with meter postage is not considered to be from a known mailer.)

All federal, state, and local government agencies are exempt from providing customs documentation on mail addressed to an APO or FPO except for those APOs/FPOs to which restriction B2 applies.

Prepaid mail from military contractors is exempt, providing the mailpiece is endorsed "Contents for Official Use - Exempt from Customs Requirements."

B1 - Form 2976 or 2976-A is required Form 2976 or 2976-A is required. Articles are liable for customs duty and/or purchase tax unless they are bona fide gifts intended for use by military personnel or their dependents. When the contents of a parcel meet these requirements, the mailer must endorse the customs form, "Certified to be a bona fide gift, personal effects, or items for personal use of military personnel and dependents," under the heading, Description of Contents. Exceptions: All other exceptions listed in restriction B above are applicable to this restriction.

C1 - Obscene Articles & Comics Obscene articles, prints, paintings, cards, films, videotapes, etc., and horror comics and matrices are prohibited.

E2 - Objectional Material Any matter depicting nude or seminude persons, pornographic or sexual items, or nonauthorized political materials is prohibited. Although religious materials contrary to the Islamic faith are prohibited in bulk quantities, items for the personal use of the addressee are permissible.

F - Firearms Firearms of any type are prohibited in all classes of mail. See definitions of firearms in DMM C024.1.1C. This restriction does not apply to firearms mailed to or by official U.S. government agencies.

H1 - Pork Prohibited Pork or pork by-products are prohibited.

M - Fruits and Vegetables Fruits, animals, and living plants are prohibited.

R - Alcoholic Beverages All alcoholic beverages, including those mailable under DMM C021, are prohibited.

R1 - Alcoholic Beverages Materials used in the production of alcoholic beverages (i.e., distilling material, hops, malts, yeast, etc.) are prohibited.

U2 - Limited to First Class Letters Mail is limited to First-Class letters only when addressed to Box R.

V - Express Mail Military Service Express Mail Military Service (EMMS) not available from any origin.

Z1 - Anti-Pilferage Seal Required The following restriction is applicable only to International Service Centers (ISC)/Exchange Offices. An Anti-Pilferage Seal (Item No. O817E or O818A) is required on all pouches and sacks.

CAG's Donation Pics [Flickr]

Games For Heroes [Official Site]

"I believe they have been degraded, we continue to PacMan, like the video game, away at their efforts, at their different levels," Major General Hammond said.

4th Infantry Update from Baghdad [KXRM Fox 21]

Hall's family believe that if he he doesn't want to be found, he won't be. They are asking for help from any and all, especially from those with some military experience, in finding the missing young man.

"He just got up and said he had to go," Courtney Birge said about the day Hall disappeared. "He's a son, a grandson, a cousin and a brother. We are not going to stop until we get him home."

We here at Kotaku send our best to Hall's family and hope for his swift return.

Marine may be evading search effort [Herald Tribune]
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

"What they really appreciate over there is the true comforts of home," Blackman Brady said. "The stress relief and the escapism involved in these games, we really think could be beneficial."

While currently just a small-town operation, Fun For Our Troops has the potential to get pretty huge, especially considering how generous the gaming community is as a whole. They are currently accepting donations of money, gift cards, and games released in 2005 or later.

No matter how you feel about the war itself, the troops in the Middle East are there doing a job for their country that not many other people would do. Check out the organization's web site to see how you can contribute to the overseas, under fire gaming community. Hang onto your copies of COD 4 though. Think they've got that covered.

Wii bit of fun for troops [Bucks County Courier Times via Game Politics]

Best quote? Barnett's conclusion that "steak knives and swimming pools pose a greater threat to children, but nobody is trying to restrict adult access to those tools." Simply a nice, articulate response that attempts to address a "grossly outdated" American view on the evils of gaming.

Way Beyond Pong [New York Times]

Crecente could probably confirm, but this scorched, decayed, melted and exploded Gameboy managed to survive the Gulf War and get shipped home. As a vet? It lounges around the New York Nintendo Store all day, playing Tetris. "The horror!" Florian Eckhardt

oceanpark's photostream [Flickr]

1UP has a truly fascinating feature up called Islamogaming: Looking for Videogames in the Muslim World. It's an absolute must read.

In what reads more often like an excellent piece for The Economist than a feature for Luke Smith's latest sanatorium, Ed Halter starts by examining a game involving the fictious Iranian Commander Bahman, who must break through Iraq to battle U.S. Special Forces and rescue a kidnapped Iranian nuclear scientist. This triggered an announced sequel by Kuma, who vowed an unofficial sequel in which American soldiers whould take on Commander Bahman.

From there, Halter expertly examines the video game industry of the Arab world as a whole, specifically examining political and religious influences on the games.

Spiked with the tensions surrounding U.S.-Iran relations, the untitled Commander Bahman project is not the first Islamic videogame to appear in the Middle East. In fact, in the past half decade a number of projects have emerged from the Muslim world, all sharing a similar goal: to subvert the typical gaming stereotype of Arabs as bad guys by replacing the typical American or European action hero with a recognizably Muslim protagonist. Like many of their American counterparts, these games often base their narratives on real-life wars and battles: While Westerners replay WWII and Vietnam, they twitch through virtual recreations of the Palestinian intifada and the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war. Though relatively small, Islamogaming is also a diverse field, ranging from amateur projects by students, unabashed anti-Zionist propaganda produced by an internationally recognized terrorist organization, religious games produced to teach Islam to kids, and a set of more sober games designed to explore the complex realities of Middle Eastern history.

This is just a fascinating read, the most fascinating feature I've read in a while. This, gentlemen, is actual gaming journalism. Florian Eckhardt

Islamogaming: Looking for Videogames in the Muslim World [1UP]

Very serious website Serious Games Source has a feature on VR being used as therapy for those suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder:

In ongoing research projects the Veterans Administration, the US Army, and the Office of Naval Research are using VR Exposure therapy to treat soldiers afflicted with PTSD. We are developing a number of Middle East conflict simulations that include such common elements as sniper attacks, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and rocket propelled grenade (RPG) attacks. These applications include functionality that allows therapists to dynamically control the intensity of the experience for the patient, increasing or decreasing the level of stimulation and tension according to the level of anxiety.

This goes along with the traditional treatment for PTSD, which has the patient re-imagining the event while in a safe environment with a mental health professional, and then reworking it over and over until it's been processed. This is a simplistic and hamhanded explanation, but you get the idea.

The problem is that those suffering from traumatic memories will generally do anything to avoid them, making the therapy difficult. Having a simulation do the "imagining" for the patient seems to shortcut this issue.

The article is long and complicated (and very serious) and full of graphs, but a good read anyway. Eliza gauger

Playing Games with Painful Memories:
Designing VR Exposure Therapy Simulations for PTSD [Serious Games Source]

By Wagner James Au

If you're from the Axis of Evil, you're not supposed to be in the legions of the Horde— even if your country got bombed out of the Axis more than three years ago. Kalimdor's a no-fly zone, as are the Eastern Kingdoms. This is because World of Warcraft's Terms of Use bars players living in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, "or any other country to which the U.S. has embargoed goods." (Citizens from Junior Axis members Syria and Cuba are similarly shit out of luck.) And though the US dropped its Iraqi embargo right after President Bush's remarkably ill-timed "Mission Accomplished" announcement in 2003, Blizzard's rules still say gamers in Baghdad shouldn't be caught leveling in Azeroth.

Which is a roundabout way to introduce "Hamletau", my 8th level Warrior currently noobing it up somewhere South of Goldshire. And though he's got a short sword and a crappy shield, Hamletau's real profession is reporter. After three years as "embedded journalist" in the kinda-sorta MMO of Second Life, where my avatar is known as "Hamlet Au" , my editors at Kotaku challenged me to try out the same kind of reporting in the biggest MMO of them all. It's one thing to report within a user-created world where players can literally make the news up, but could I create a news desk in an old school, hierarchical, level-oriented MMO? Who has time to talk about virtual anti-Bush protests or avatar racism, when there's dungeons to raid?

And though I've argued that every MMO should hire a team of embedded journalists , I was a bit anxious to try it myself. There's news going on in WoW all the time, whether it's a plague resembling a terrorist bio-warfare strike , or a temporary ban on guilds defined by sexual orientation or an attack (staged or real) on the memorial service for a guild member who apparently died in real life. But how can any one person report from a place with 6 million-plus members scattered on 1000+ servers?

Fortunately, the first WoW story angle popped up even before I'd finished the registration process. On paper, at least, despite all the troubles Iraq has been through, and is still going through— not to mention the Coalition soldiers covered in dust and IED shrapnel flakes just looking for a damn hour of R&R at their base's Internet caf — World of Warcraft is still supposed to be off limits to the entire country.

But how strongly enforced were these regulations? As it happens, I know an Iraqi gamer in Baghdad, so I asked him.

"[Y]es," Zeyad e-mailed me back, "I have played [WoW] in the past. It's not very popular here as, say, Red Alert or Empire Earth, for example, but the game has its fans." Zeyad is the secular Sunni author of the enormously popular Healing Iraq blog, and when he's not reporting first-hand on firefights in Adhamiya or lynchings in Husseiniya, he's often gaming. (Notice the Paypal link on his site; assisted by 1337 blogger Jeff Jarvis, Zeyad is trying to raise enough money to get out of Iraq to study journalism in New York. Help a fellow gamer out, for god's sake, the dude's trapped in a Counterstrike match that never ends.)

"I have noticed plenty of games and software with the ban on Iraq warning," Zeyad's e-mail continued, "but you know that we get most of our games, software, and DVDs though piracy anyway." This was also the case during Saddam's regime, Zeyad told me, when bootlegs games were freely available in Baghdad's Bab Al-Sharj markets—after the secret police had first play-tested them to make sure they didn't contain anti-Saddam material, that is.

Zeyad isn't impressed with Blizzard's ban on Iraqis. "As long as we have piracy here," he told me, "I wouldn't care less if they still have a ban on Iraq. No one here really buys originals when they can get the game or DVD at a one dollar price." Which, when you think about it, is probably one of the best markers for real progress in Iraq. Forget about voting or troop withdrawal, we'll know the country is actually a stable member of the world economy when Blizzard's corporate parent Universal-Vivendi sends a team of lawyers into the Bab Al-Sharj to make sure the electronic stores don't have any contraband Warcraft on their shelves.

I checked with Blizzard to see if the ban against World of Warcraft in Iraq was still being enforced.

"After with consulting with the legal team that wrote up the Terms of Use," Blizzard PR assistant George Wang e-mailed back, "they informed me that Iraq and Iran had previously been on a government list of embargoed goods when the ToU was first drafted. Because of this, we did not condone shipping World of Warcraft to Iraq..." Wang told me the Terms of Use will soon be updated to reflect the updated embargo list, though more than a month after contacting him, it still has Iraq listed on the Axis of No Play.

Then again, there's little reason to think the ban was enforced much at all. Veteran WoW players tell me they often raid with folks who say they are Coalition troops in Iraq who've cleverly hacked around military firewalls to log in. And while it's doubtful that anyone but Kim Jung-Il and his geek cronies could log into World of Warcraft from North Korea, there's still an embargo on Iran. I checked with some contacts an Orkut, the semi-defunct quasi-Myspace that's still popular with Iranians, to see if they could WoW from Tehran.

An Iranian IT consultant eventually e-mailed me from somewhere inside the theocratic regime:

"hi dear ... yes , i and my friends play WOW in iran... this game is buying in shopping in iran."

So despite round-the-clock "morality" enforcers on the street and an Iranian President who keeps threatening to launch nuclear conflagration, WoW finds a way in, and continues its spread around the globe.

There's actually a serious side to all this. Despite the early promise of an Internet that could truly connect the entire world, vast firewalls block the Web traffic to and from countries like Iran and China. Web traffic, that is, because up to now, authoritarian regimes have not blocked the chat in MMOs— this despite the nearly two million Chinese alone who play World of Warcraft. But sheer numbers make it inevitable that some of them will soon test the limits of political expression in WoW. Picture a Chinese guild conducting Falun Gong meditations in Booty Bay, or a memorial to Tiananmen Square's dead held in Stormwind, and you get an idea of the possibilities of free expression, even when you look like an orc.

So I asked Blizzard's George Wang about the inevitable: "If governments in Iran or China asked Blizzard to help them regulate 'subversive' chat in World of Warcraft," I e-mailed him, "how would the company respond?"

Unfortunately, I didn't get any reply to the two times I sent that question. And so the dagger hangs over the head of WoW's Chinese and Iranian players, who must wonder if (or rather, when) Vivendi-Universal will go the way of Yahoo! and Google, and bring the hammer down.

It looks like there's a need for virtual reporters in World of Warcraft, after all.

In between WoW bouts, Wagner James Au still covers the emerging world of Second Life. Send Warcraft news tips to "Hamletau" on the Eitrigg server, or e-mail him— au at kotaku dot com.

A military sim trainer without weapons? Tactical Iraqi focuses not on body counts, but body language. Soldiers learn things that might be offensive in the US are not necessarily in Iraq and vice versa.

Developed by the USC's Information Sciences Institute, the game differs from previous sims that focused solely on language. Tactical Iraqi must navigate language, cultural gestures and taboos. So far, 300 soldiers have used the system and several thousand more are expected to have by the end of the year.

The game contains no weapons or combat situations. Rather, soldiers must gain the trust of Iraqi communities in helping to rebuild. "I got a kick out of removing the weapons and replacing them with gestures," says the program's technical director Hannes Vilhjalmsson.

In Iraq, things like introducing oneself with out introducing others and showing the soles of one's feet are considered rude. Vilhjalmsson recalls when an Iraqi man gestured at a female troop by rubbing his fingers together. The gesture meant friendship. Situations like this can lead to misunderstanding in the volatile war-zone.

"An 18-year-old who joins the military might be in a foreign land for the first time and think that everyone does it like we do in America," says Marine Lt. Christopher Seeley.

We've got our fair share of FPS titles, how about a few First Person Interaction games? Civilians learn how to interact with various types of people. Because Lieutenant, it's not only new recruits that think that way.

More Here [Wired]