Burak, the co-founder of Impact Games and now president of Games for Change (G4C), was a keynote speaker during the first of a three-day conference on "Exploring New Frontiers in Peacebuilding." The daylong meeting at USIP, which was webcast, also featured sessions on peacebuilding and diplomacy in African conflicts such as South Sudan, dealing with complexity in the field and tackling the issues of urban violence and cross-border criminal activity.

"Today's conflicts, from Syria to South Sudan to Burma, Ukraine and Egypt, require solutions on a different scale," said Melanie Greenberg, the president and chief executive officer of the Alliance. "We need new thinking about the links between democracy, conflict and social change" and on a range of issues covered by the conference panels, she said.

On the Africa panel, Princeton Lyman, a former U.S. special envoy to Sudan and South Sudan who is now at USIP, addressed the question of whether the current severe violence in the post-independence south could have been anticipated. The international community made an enormous investment in helping the country establish its new government and resolve the continuing conflict with Sudan, and South Sudan's leadership was too preoccupied with those lingering tensions and neglected domestic concerns, he said.

In the case of Nigeria, where the militant group Boko Haram kidnapped and has held 276 girls, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson said the drivers of insecurity in that northern belt include persistent economic decline, underdevelopment, political marginalization and an ill-considered security policy. In the country's mid-section, a separate resource conflict pits herders against farmers, said Carson, who also now is a senior advisor to the president of USIP.

USIP Acting President Kristin Lord said that, as the Institute considers its contributions to the field and the lessons learned in advance of its 30th anniversary in October, it is also "painfully aware of how big the challenges are."

"I truly believe that addressing violent conflict is the central challenge of our time," Lord told the audience, adding that the consequences go beyond even the immediate destruction. "Violence threatens every other positive agenda we have in the world. Whether it's health or human rights, development or democracy, counter-terrorism and national security, or social justice, it is far, far harder to build stronger, more prosperous, more just societies when violence becomes prevalent."

In bringing technology to bear on such issues, Burak is trying to corner part of the $66 billion global gaming market for platforms that advance social causes such as peace, development and the empowerment of women and girls. He served as executive producer of the games associated with the Half the Sky project by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

"A lot of research is piling up about this medium," Burak said. "Unlike very traditional media that puts people in a very passive position, this medium can actually get kids, especially young adults …, to participate, to make decisions, to see consequences, to learn at their own pace, to fail – and see what happens when they fail – in a safe environment."

He told the story of the Peres Center for Peace, named after the president of Israel and Nobel Peace laureate, buying 100,000 copies of PeaceMaker and distributing 20,000 of them for free through newspapers in Israel and the West Bank. With the rest, they began working with Israeli and Palestinian students, at first separately and then in joint workshops.

Burak said the lack of knowledge and understanding among the students of geography, the stakeholders involved in a scenario and the agendas of those figures was "stunning" and highlighted the failure of the education systems to address the issues underlying the long-running conflict.

"For me, it was a huge moment of understanding," he said. "Let's say it's bittersweet."

The game not only gives players an opportunity to open important discussions but also gives them a certain distance and freedom to express views in the guise of a role in the scenarios, Burak said.

Some teachers are even beginning to go beyond using finished games in their classrooms to using tools that are being made available to build entirely new games, Burak said. Still, the idea of gaming for serious causes faces the hurdle of not being taken as seriously as it should be, he said, even though the age of the average player of computer and video games has risen to 30.

Many players have commented that they learned more from three hours of playing PeaceMaker than they had from years of watching the news.

"The game connected the dots for people," he said.