BEIRUT: In early 2009 Reine Abbas and Ziad Feghali launched a war – a virtual war. Outraged by an online Israeli computer game in which players won points for killing children and bombing civilian targets, the politically conscious founders of Wixel Studios, along with their partner Karim Abi Saleh, decided to fight back by creating “Gaza Shield,” an online game in which the objective is to save children from Israeli shelling.
That fight is now the subject matter of a documentary set to be screened during the 10th edition of the DocuDays film festival, which runs from Dec. 15-20 in Beirut.
“We saw one day during the war on Gaza an Israeli game online. [In] this game [when] you kill children, you get more points. The more you kill, the more you demolish, [the more points you get] ... you hit schools, you hit [the] U.N.,” Abbas explains.
“We were really, really shocked,” she says. “We wanted to see how we could fight this online.”
Taking the war online involved four sleepless nights of intense designing to create the defensive game “Gaza Shield.” It was a matter of coincidence that during these four days filmmakers Tania Khalaf and David Hamilton were visiting the designers. The footage shot during that time is now a 17-minute documentary also titled “Gaza Shield,” which premiered at The Arab Film Festival in Australia last July and will premiere in Lebanon Dec. 18.
In the game Gaza Shield each time players save children and pass a level, the Gaza environs become more colorful and healthier. “It’s like giving hope,” Feghali says.
Gaza Shield is not the first game the Lebanese company produced as an online battlefield. Wixel Studios was founded at a time of political unrest in 2007 after the duo released Douma, a simple combat game that allows players to pit caricatures of Lebanese politicians against each other in fistfights.
In Douma (“puppets” in Arabic) the players become the puppeteers, capable for once of manipulating their politicians. Players select two fighters from Samir G., Saad H., Michel A., Hssein H.H., Sleiman F., Nabih B. and Walid J., each of which has a signature move in addition to a standard range of kicks, punches and blocks. Samir G., for example, in what Abbas describes as her favorite special move, kneels and brings down the hand of God to crush his opponent, while Hssein H.H. summons a missile-adapted pickup to obliterate his enemy.
“We didn’t expect [the] 12,000 people [that played Douma] in the first night,” Feghali says, adding that they didn’t market the game but that word of it spread through the blogosphere.
To date, he says, some 2 million people have played Douma and it has been received in good humor by the public figures it parodies. However, Abbas points out: “We took a risk ... because we really did not know what they [the political groups] would do. Maybe they would hit us, kidnap us, or bomb our houses. It was a big risk. But at the same time we knew what we were doing. Everyone was happy. All the blogs of all the parties were happy with the game.
“For example, the blog of Hezbollah, they were laughing at it. They were really happy [and] making fun of some politicians like Jumblatt – his boots and jacket. They were talking about these things – the clothes and special moves.”
Walid J., a clear caricature of the Progressive Socialist Party leader, wears impossibly tight trousers and can summon a stampede of angry protesters to trample his opponent.
Douma ranks the characters by the number of times players have chosen them to fight, and each character accumulates points based on the victories won for them by the players. Samir G. is currently the top character, with Michel A. coming in second.
The success of Douma pushed Abbas and Feghali to leave the jobs they held at the time and found Wixel Studios.
“We decided to open our own company,” Abbas explains. “We saw that if you make a local game from our own culture it can be a success. Because we in the Arab world used to take games from outside and Arabize the games and change something, or copy these games, nothing was customized for us. We [decided we] can create this industry. We decided to open Wixel Studios and we left the other company.”
Not only has Wixel Studios succeeded in making games customized for the Lebanese and Arab market, the innovative scoring system used in Douma has even been adopted by foreign companies.
“Miniclip.com ... contacted us to do something together. ... [But] we told them we wanted to do local games. We were really surprised when they used the same mechanics [as is used in Douma] in a game with fighting between Obama and Clinton when they were running for president,” the Wixel founders explain.
Having produced a range of free online games for the Lebanese market, Abbas and Ferghali are taking on a more global market by developing Santa’s Rookie, a game for smartphones that also serves as social commentary on China’s dominance of the toy manufacturing industry.
For the region, they are developing a new Douma-style game for the Egyptian elections.
Masr 3ayza min? (Who does Egypt want?) lets players fight as their preferred presidential candidate for victory over the other contenders.
Masr 3ayza min? is still in beta format but will hopefully be released in its completed form in early January. So far, Mohamed Elbaradei is the most popular character and approximately 35,000 people have played the game.
Wixel has included Google’s Wael Ghonim in the game, despite not being a presidential candidate, to acknowledge the role of the cyber activists in the Egyptian revolution of Jan. 25, 2011.
“If Masr is successful,” Abbas says, “we might do something [similar] for the Arab world.”
Her enthusiasm is palpable as Feghali chimes in: “What drives us is pure passion.
After three years and not making a decent living out of it, we don’t have yet a sustainable company [but], we still have the same passion that we had the first day and we know that it’s going to happen.”
Wixel Studios games are available online at http://www.wixelstudios.com/games/. DocuDays film festival runs from Dec. 15-20. Gaza Shield screens Dec. 18 at 8 p.m. in Al-Madina Theater.