Almost a year ago, I wrote a guest post on the ReadWriteWeb network site, Last 100 talking about Advertising in Video Games. I commented:

Explaining to media executives that it’s getting harder to engage an audience’s attention is like explaining rising fuel costs to the aviation industry — it just isn’t necessary … However, one medium that is emerging as a great platform to deliver relevant ads to a receptive and engaged audience is video games. Advertisers are taking notice; according to research released in April by eMarketer the worldwide market for in game advertising was estimated to be over $690 million last year and growing at over 20% annually projected to almost $2 billion by 2011.

A few months after that post, I ended up really getting to know the team at Impact Games, another group of Pittsburgh entreprenuers that have created a platform that allows individuals to ‘play the news.’

After hearing their vision, I came to believe that games could revolutionize the publishing industry, in a whole different way. Specifically, by creating a platform to deliver different expert’s point of view and allow the audience to expres their opinion on the impact. All delivered in a frienly game like interface. This is especially for the crucial under 25 demographic who grew up playing video games and (generally) gets their news from John Stewart. (They’ve actually built an proof of concept game on the Isreal / Palestinian conflict called PeaceMaker.) After some dicussions, I ended up accepting a position on their advisory board.

But today it became much more real, as ReadWriteWeb beacme the first publishing parter to deploy a game. Specifically a game on the Google App Engine. You can see a post by Richard MacManus, the site’s founder and editor, explaining the game and encouraging visitors to try it out.

Please, go check it out and let me know what you think!