For a couple of years I worked as an online journalist at CNN. The job carried its degree of prestige: almost everybody picks up the phone when you tell them it's CNN. I discovered this fact the moment that I quit my job for a position at Cartoon Network (trust me; "I'm calling from Cartoon Network" doesn't nearly have the same effect, unless the person at the other end of the phone is under 12 years old). The pace at CNN was frantic: it was really hard to get bored because we were so busy all the time. Still, on the rare occasions when I was able to take a break, I longed for a more human, less objective form of journalism. What I missed were editorials and political cartoons. Especially political cartoons.

The source of my love for political cartoons may surprise you: it came from my history and geography high school lessons. I generally rant against how boring high school education is but I must admit that whoever wrote my history and geography manuals did a hell of a job. In addition to having photographs and maps, they also included tons of political cartoons. Through these drawings I learned about contemporary history (mainly from the 70s to the 90s). These cartoons – mainly drawn by Le Monde’s cartoonist Plantu, since my manuals were French – were not only funny; they also synthesized the essential points of the lesson with grace and clarity. Certainly, the drawings were often too one-sided or simplistic but this was irrelevant because they did not aim at replacing the written lessons. Since then I cannot imagine studying contemporary events without the support of newspaper cartoons.

If you also take into account my long-time love for video games, you may understand why I am such a big advocate of what I ended up calling "newsgaming". A newsgame is simply a video game that deals with some current news event. Simply put, a newsgame is a political cartoon in video game form. Even if I did coin the term, I by no means invented the concept. Newsgames have been around for quite a while, mainly as amateur, satirical games that people play online for free.

The biggest challenge to creating newsgames is timing. Developing games is very time-consuming, so it is extremely hard to create a newsgame before it becomes old news. Thankfully, tools like Adobe Flash have simplified the process of creating simple games that anybody can share for free with the rest of the world through the internet.

My first newsgame – I did not even call it that then – was created as a reaction to the US bombing of Afghanistan. It's called "Kabul Kaboom" and it can be played here I did it in 2001, while flying from Oregon to Georgia: it mainly took me a few hours to craft. The game featured a surreal aspect of the war: the US was bombing the country but at the same time they were throwing food supplies as humanitarian aid. I was disgusted at the most powerful country on Earth bombing the poorest one while trying to get away with it by being "humanitarian". To make things worse, a few people were hit by the dropped food and died. Additionally, food packages also destroyed several civilian houses. So I created a game where the main character had to dodge bombs while grabbing burgers falling from the sky. I never expected my game to be played by anybody other than my blog readers and friends. So I posted it online and I forgot about it for a couple of days until I realized that tens of thousands of people were playing it.

A couple of years later, I joined my friend Sofia Battegazzore and we founded our own game development studio Powerful Robot Games which is based in Uruguay, our home country. In addition to producing commercial games, we are also interested in experimenting with video game as a novel medium for communication. Given the early success of Kabul Kaboom, we decided to explore further into this area and we launched Newsgaming.com.

Our first game for the site was called "September 12th", which we launched in 2003. Basically, it aimed at being a commentary on the so-called War on Terror. The game shows a Middle Eastern village, populated by both civilians and terrorists. The player controls a target that looks like a sniper rifle cross-hair but that actually launches missiles. Most of the time, if you try to kill a terrorist, you end up by also killing innocent civilians. However, each time that a civilian dies, other civilians will cry by his dead body and will turn into terrorists. After a very short time, the player realizes that it is impossible to win this game, because violence only begets more violence.

Even though it looks quite simple, "September 12th" took about three months of development. Our next game was produced in less than 48 hours. It was made as a reaction to the March 11th, 2004 terrorist attacks in Spain's capital city. The game, entitled simply "Madrid", features a candlestick vigil where the player has to keep the flames alive by clicking on them.

Both games reached several million players. "September 12th" was by far the most controversial: we received our share of hate mail and threats. A lot of people strongly disagreed with its depiction of the War on Terror. However, our main goal was not to point out the futility of this war but rather to encourage players to think critically about it. We used the game as a way to illustrate the systemic idea of escalating violence – and were sadly proved right when it came to the situation in Iraq, as a recent US government intelligence report admitted.