(Answering my own question, just as a point of view:) Games seem to allow us to posit our own ideas and strategies in the model of the message, and not quite allow the designer full narrative control. While we’re able to interperate a static message however we like, games also afford us to place our own message – thus the message in the game becomes something of a co-operative force between player and designer. Each instance of the game played out could give a different message. Perhaps a non-subjective simulation could be one where a question is asked by the designer, and the player gives a solution, but there is no intended correct solution (or atleast, the possibility to express yourself as a player in many different ways, without it being called a failure scenario).

The September 12 game is really a simulation of a process that, as noted elsewhere, really does have a real-world basis, and even a simulation-veracity test: do assaults lead to the creation of terrorists? The fact that a recent Palestinian suicide-bomber was a woman whose cousins were killed in an Israel air raid suggests that, to some extent, the game is “objective” – it models a real-world situation. It’s also ideologically motivated and not disinterested. The point is that so is Counter-Strike, to all extents and purposes (and it is also “objective” in its way, although the object of the simulation is about technologies and tactics, not about politics and culture – and that choice of object is also ideological). Only Counter-Strike doesn’t bill itself as such.

Now try to imagine this game as a 1st person shooter. It could sell quite well, and no-one would care what the designers meant to put in there.

The whole idea of newsgames seems… disturbing to me. Not that it’s new. I recall from the mid-80s an Israeli computer game called Intifada. The player was an Israeli soldier facing a stone- and molotov cocktail-throwing mob. The type of ammo given the soldier (tear gas, rubber bullets, live ammo) was limited by the prime minister in office. A “successful” round would make the PM more right-wing, giving you access to “better” ammo. But you could just try to survive a round without killing anyone and then the PM would be more left-wing. You COULD read the game that way.
And you could note that no matter WHAT you did, the Intifada continued. You could read it THAT way as well.

So are newsgames biased? The designers think they are, but the players definitely don’t have to play by the rules. They don’t have to enjoy the same bits. You can play GTA without killing a single innocent bystander. You can spend a few precious minutes in MoH emptying clip after clip into the face of that smug British officer you’re sent to rescue. Games, far more than movies or literature, are what the player makes them. The game could send you a message, but the fun-facture enables you to completely ignore that message and concentrate on what does it for YOU.

Note, by the way, that my objection was to splitting the world into a “good” and a “bad” side.
Couldn’t the September 12th game be accused of doing this?

Your wish for a simulation that “says” that Islamic fundementalism is “bad” is ultimately another reach for a fantasy of disinterested simulation to model good guys and bad guys. Gonzalo has modelled an experience: that of those who live, on a day to day basis, in those territories. It’s an element which is strategically left out of any other terror-sim.

So, the bit that I’ll describe as controversial is the implicit claim that other simulations are – or can be – disinterested in a way that this one is not. You posit 2 perspectives: objectivity, and the experiential perspective on the day-to-day from the US (and Europe.) The idea that a completely fair simulation is possible is problematic; the objection to one that is unfair simply because it comes from the least-represented zone of representation is moreso.