WarCo is a first-person shooter game where players shoot camer footage instead of a gun. A work in progress at Brisbane, Australia-based studio Defiant Development, the game is a collaboration of sorts; Defiant is working with both a journalist and a filmmaker to create a game that puts you in the role of a journalist embedded in a war zone. It’s the latest in a growing trend around games with an activist slant, hoping to send a message to the masses through mobile entertainment channels.

The player runs through a modern battlefield amongst other soldiers.  Bullets whiz by, explosives go off. However, if you look closely, the hand of the perspective character isn’t holding a gun, but instead a camera, because Warco is actually a “journalist simulator,” sending a civilian into battle in order to document the terrors of war.

“What we ask you to do is to go and film the story elements that you find interesting and then at the end of that section the game will put together a story based on which story elements you focused on..” says  Morgan Jaffitt, The game developer.

“As an example: in the opening of the game – as you arrive on a plane into an airport that’s currently under fire in the middle of the revolution you can focus on the story of the loyalist soldiers who are defending the airport; you can focus on the story of a wounder civilian who’s looking for her daughter; or you can focus on the issue of the arms that are coming into the country, and being supplied by various international agencies, and what that means about their relationships with the loyalist forces.”

The game was actually the brainchild of someone outside of the studio. Tony Maniaty, an Australian journalist who has reported from regions like East Timor and post-Soviet Eastern Europe, envisioned the game as a sort of training simulator.

He then began working on the project with filmmaker Robert Connolly, who directed the film Balibo, a political thriller about the deaths of Australian journalists during the conflict in East Timor in 1975. Eventually Jaffit and Defiant were brought into the project.

Meanwhile, Apple has banned a game that depicts the working conditions and suicides related to Foxconn, a mobile handset assembly center.  Called Phone Story, the removal of the game that includes references to child labor and factory-worker suicides reignite debates over the consumer electronics manufacturing process, as well as Apple’s top-down management of its App Store.

Another game with a mission was Dog Wars, though its mission was the result of an anonymous hack.  Dog Wars is controversial app for Android devices, pitting virtual dogs against one another in simulated blood-fight scenarios.  The game requires the player to raise and train a digital dog that will fight against other players’ dogs. Real-world dog fights are illegal in many countries around the world, including the Unites States.

Google had the app removed from the Android store back in April and for good reason. However, third-party websites have been hosting Dog Wars for mobile phone users to download.  But when some users went to download the app they were hit with a nasty surprise from the animal rights activists who leveraged the game as a Trojan, setting up code that would send a message to your phone contacts and PETA that you’re cruel to animals (even digital ones).