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NEW YORK (AP) — Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the American sentenced to death by the Iranian government, is linked to a small New York company specializing in video games that recreate real-life conflicts in the Middle East and beyond.

The company, Kuma Games, makes a series of "Kuma/War" games that come in short, 10- to 15-minute episodes. The scenarios are usually nabbed from the news, and like documentary films, they seek to be as accurate as possible in chronicling real-life situations. Players can simulate events such as the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Afghan air strikes or the death of Moammar Gadhafi. There's also "Assault on Iran," about the country's nuclear ambitions.

"They are best known across academia, war hounds, people interested in war. Maybe soldiers or ex-soldiers," said Lindsay Grace, a professor who studies video games at Miami University in Ohio.

They are not "living-room games" like "Call of Duty", the popular shooter series by Activision Blizzard Inc., he said.

It's not the first time that video games have stirred up international barbs. Cuba denounced the 2010 version of "Call of Duty," in which U.S. special operations soldiers try to kill a young Fidel Castro. The country's state-run media said the game will turn American children into sociopaths. THQ Inc.'s "Homefront," meanwhile, had its cinematic opening scene changed in Japan, with references to North Korea's Kim Jong-Il and the country itself removed and replaced with "Northern Leader" and "A country to the North," respectively.

Iranian authorities accuse Hekmati of spying, but the U.S. —and Hekmati's family— said the charges are false. This week, he became the first American sentenced to death in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

The 28-year-old Hekmati was linked to the gaming company in December, when the former U.S. Marine interpreter was shown giving a purported confession in a video that was broadcast nationally in Iran.

In the video, Hekmati said he worked for New York-based Kuma Games, "a computer games company which received money from CIA to design and make special films and computer games to change the public opinion's mindset in the Middle East and distribute them among Middle East residents free of charge. The goal of Kuma Games was to convince the people of the world and Iraq that what the U.S. does in Iraq and other countries is good and acceptable," according to an account of his statements in the English-language Tehran Times.

Kuma did not respond to repeated email messages for comment this week, and a listed phone number for the New York-based company did not connect to anyone.

The website of the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research program lists an "Amir Hekmati" as the principal investigator for Kuma LLC with a Kuma email address, indicating that he worked for the company. The website says Kuma was awarded $95,920 for developing a second-language training program for the Department of Defense. The CIA was not listed among the agencies participating in the program, and it's unclear whether it has any connections to Kuma. The CIA declined to comment.

It is not unusual for a video game company to do side projects for the military, said Stephen Totilo, editor-in-chief of video game blog Kotaku, who visited the company's office in 2006 when he worked for MTV. Totilo said Kuma's CEO told him at the time that Kuma has done some work developing training software for the U.S. Army as a side project.

The office, he added, looked much like any other small game studio, with "a bunch of young guys, some just out of college," working with the same tools as creators of other shooter games.

Though many of Kuma's games are based on recent events in the Middle East, the company also makes games such as "DinoHunters," which lets players fight dinosaurs and "I, Predator," based on the Animal Planet series.

But the war games are getting much of the attention.

Are they propaganda?

"Obviously, they are biased, like anything," said Ian Bogost, a game designer and Georgia Tech professor who wrote about Kuma in his book, "Newsgames." ''But I think it would be pretty bad Western propaganda if you took Kuma's existing products and dropped them in Iran."

Propaganda, he says, would be less subtle than Kuma's games, which are "really quite modest. Let's take this thing in the news and recreate it."

That said, it's hard to say how players in the Middle East would respond to games created in the West, he added — just as it's hard to say how American players would react to games created from Iran's perspective.

Kuma's "Assault on Iran" episode seeks to offer players "the most plausible scenario to delaying or destroying Iran's nuclear arms capabilities," according to the company's website. It was released in 2005. Two years later, Kuma's CEO Keith Halper told video game blog Gamasutra that the game was downloaded "hundreds of thousands of times" in Iran.

"We put Iranian and American gamers face to face, playing and talking together in a virtual space in a way that still eludes our real-world politicians," Gamasutra quoted him as saying in May 2007.

On its website, Kuma describes its war games as an "interactive chronicle of the war on terror" and says the company is "very sensitive and respectful of American and coalition soldiers and the sacrifices they are making every day." It says it donates money to two veterans groups — the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund and the Vietnam Unit Memorial Monument fund.

"They want to sell you on the experience that you get to do the battle," Kotaku's Totilo said. "You get to be the soldier."

He added that it would be easy to say that what Kuma is doing is "pro-U.S. military," in the sense that anyone who is recreating conflicts and letting people play from the American perspective is taking America's side.

"We have a whole host of movie directors and TV producers who, like Kuma, recreate real battles from an American perspective," he said. "And I haven't seen them as quickly accused of being a front for the CIA."

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Social and casual game maker PopCap—which was recently acquired by gaming giant Electronic Arts—has published the results of a new survey (PDF) that finds nearly half (48 percent) of people who cheat at online social games like Farmville and Mafia Wars are also cheaters at life, doing things like stealing towels and magazines from hotels and waiting rooms, illegally parking in handicapped spaces, and even cheating on their partners in a committed relationship. In comparison, just 14 percent of folks who say they don’t cheat at social games report cheating in real life.

“How we behave in virtual space and interact with others in social games often mirrors how we act in the real world,” said North Dakota University psychology professor Clay Routledge, in a statement. “With more than 100 million people playing social games regularly, we can expect to see the full range of psychological characteristics represented in the social gaming population—even cheating.”

The survey was conducted by Information Solutions Group for PopCap, and consisted of online surveys of 1,201 respondents in the U.S. and UK who are members of Toluna’s Internet ePanel. To qualify for the survey respondents had to play social games for at least 15 minutes a week. All things being equal, which they rarely are—in theory has a margin of error of about 2.5 percent.

Amongst cheaters, the most common form of reported real-life cheating was cheating on tests at school (53 percent), although some 58 percent of cheaters in the UK reported cheating on their taxes (compared to 33 percent amongst responding U.S. cheaters). Some 51 percent of social game cheaters reported stealing from hotels and illegally parking in handicapped parking spaces, compared to just 14 percent and 12 percent, respectively, amongst non-cheaters. And, perhaps the unkindest cut of all, some 49 percent of social game cheaters reported they cheated on a committed real life relationship, compared to just 15 percent of non-social-game cheaters.

Overall, the survey found that most people don’t bother to cheat at social games: overall, 82 percent of respondents play them straight, leaving 18 percent who cheat. (The UK had proportionately more cheaters than the United States.) Males were also somewhat more likely to cheat at social games than females (54 percent compared to 46 percent) and social game cheaters are, on average, a bit younger than non-cheaters. Interestingly, the survey also found that social game cheaters are considerably more likely to buy virtual items and currency with real money than are non-cheaters, with 86 percent reporting they would be very or somewhat likely to buy a virtual item to gain a short-term advantage in a game. Ironically, this could indicate cheaters are among social games’ best customers—possibly because they are more personally invested at succeeding at the game.

[Image courtesy of Piotr Marcinski/Shutterstock]

This article was originally posted on Digital Trends

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