Games for Change (G4C) -- home

OVERVIEW

This May, the only festival dedicated to the exciting new movement of Digital Games for Social Change will explore real-world impact, the latest games, and funding strategies. Hosted in New York City by Parsons The New School for Design, the 6th annual Games for Change Festival will take place May 27 – 29, 2009. The Annual Games for Change Festival brings together the world’s leading foundations, NGOs, game-makers, academics, and journalists to explore how best to harness this incredibly powerful medium to help address the most critical issues of our day, from poverty, climate change, global conﬂicts, to human rights. Every year, the festival doubles in size and brings in new, high-impact partners.

The festival includes 3 exciting days of panels, keynotes and brainstorming sessions, as well as funders' meetings, press briefings, a private journalists dinner, an in-conference game, birds-of-a-feather gatherings and the usual excellent networking opportunities. This year we'll also be featuring the first-ever Newsgame Award at the Expo Night on May 28th, sponsored by the Knight Foundation, an evening games Expo and reception where attendees can play these new games ﬁrst-hand and watch the awards ceremony for the best news games.

Called "the Sundance of video games" for "socially-responsible game-makers" we’re promoting a new genre of video game – games to change the world – for the better.

Join us in this exciting and important new ﬁeld!

Games for Change is pleased to announce:

The 6th Annual Games for Change Festival Opening Keynote: Nicholas Kristof, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the The New York Times.

Featured Speakers

Lucy Bradshaw
Executive Producer, Spore

Jim Gee
Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Chair in Literacy Studies at Arizona State University

Henry Jenkins
Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities

Other speakers include:

Ian Bogost, CEO of Persuasive Games and author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism

Heather Chaplin, journalist (NPR, NYT) and author of Smart Bomb, and many others.

N'Gai Croal, Technology Editor, Newsweek Magazine

Mary Flanagan, Director of the Tiltfactor Lab

Tracy Fullerton, Director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab and author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Designing Innovative Games

Judith Helfand, Independent filmmaker

John Nordlinger, Microsoft Research

Seth Scheisel, New York Times game critic

Eric Zimmerman, CEO of Gamelab and author of Rules of Play

Participating organizations:
Warner Brothers
National Geographic
MIT
Harvard
The United Nations
Participant Productions
Center for Disease Control
USAID

SPECIAL FIRST DAY FOR NEWBIES on May 27
(Back by popular demand!)

Let the Games Begin: 101 Workshop on Making Social Issue Games, (2008 MacArthur Foundation’s DML Competition award-winner) This workshop is a soup-to-nuts tutorial on the fundamentals of social issue games. Appealing to those who are new to designing learning games but passionate about social issues, the workshop will feature leading experts on game design, fundraising, evaluation, youth participation, distribution, and press strategies. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the 2009 Games for Change Festival, and will be extended for the rest of the year through an online community dedicated to learning about social games. For more information, see here.

Special Thanks to our Sponsors: