IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War) was set up in 2004 following a conference organised by Veterans for Peace in Boston. It works to support American soldiers and veterans who are under pressure not to speak out.

IVAW’s specific aims also include bringing a rounded view of the conflict to a society whose access to information depends on mass media over which the government and the military exert a strong influence.

The target audience on this occasion was young people and teenagers. Many of the propaganda messages seeking to justify war are traditionally aimed at this group and the organisation considers them to be among the direct or indirect victims of the war. After all, they represent the main source of new recruits, the new soldiers who are necessary for any war.

IVAW’s intention with this campaign was to reach this audience in an effective, memorable way and even to invite commitment and somehow counteract the large numbers of messages in favour of the conflict generated in the mass media.

To do this we used a different medium, one that generated an experience. We developed a video game: THE TRUTH OF THE WAR, which clearly expressed the only truth about the war that they don’t tell you about very much: your own death. The first video game where you only get one life.

We developed it and sold it for $0.99 without anybody knowing what they were buying, and achieved over 230,000 downloads, $154,100 in donations and, most importantly, brought our message in an original way to a particularly hard-to-reach target audience.

After trying to get the major companies to cooperate, the video game was developed by a small studio (Nurendsoft).

Faced with the major platforms’ refusal and their control over the products that use them, we decided to develop it for PC. This is an important market whatever one might think and, above all, one that is less controlled (a report by the firm DFC Intelligence has now raised its internal forecast for the global PC gaming market this year from $22 billion to $25 billion).

We advertised it with a small banner campaign in video game magazines.

We posted it in September 2013 in different online stores at a price of $0.99.

After a few months, we also posted a free version in order to try to viralise it further and avoid problems with the online stores themselves.

53% donated the amount to IVAW

31% donated the amount to IVAW and brought another game from Nurendsoft

16% wanted the paid refunded

100% admitted that it made them talk about war seriously