Early Registration Launches for 'Games for Change' Annual Conference in June

Games for Change (G4C) has launched the early registration website for its 2006 conference on “Social Change and Digital Games.” The 3rd annual event will be co-hosted June 27th and 28th with the New School in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Registration fees will increase after May 26th. Full event details are available at: www.gamesforchange.org/conference/2006/index.htm
This event is the annual gathering for the exciting new movement using digital games to address the most pressing issues of our day. At the conference, expert practitioners -- academics, activists, non-profits -- will be called in to examine the impact of current games and preliminary work to build the field. Keynotes include Bob Kerrey, The New School President, and best-selling author Steven Johnson of "Everything Bad Is Good For You." A showcase of the latest social change games will be open to the media at the Games Expo. Panel topics include Games for Global Peace, Creating a PBS for Games, Academic Evaluation Efforts, Recent Funding Initiatives, Health and Environmental Awareness Campaigns, and Guerrilla Nonprofit Games.

Featured speakers include Josh Fouts, Executive Director of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, Connie Yowell, Senior Program Officer, MacArthur Foundation, Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, authors of “Smart Bomb,” game maker Asi Burak of PeaceMaker, the UW-Madison's David Williamson Shaffer, representatives from MTV and the Museum of the Moving Image, David Rejeski, Director of the Foresight and Governance Project at the Wilson Center, and Katie Salen, Acting Director of the Design and Technology Center at the New School, among many others.

A private briefing for potential funders to this field will be hosted the previous day by the Robert Wood Johnson, Surdna and MacArthur Foundations. In addition, a media-only briefing will take place at the Games Expo on the 27th.

Videogames are increasingly ubiquitous. More than half of all Americans play them, as this technology matures there is the potential for a new breed of games to emerge with a real impact on such diverse issues as poverty, health reform and racial inequities. This year’s featured games include the public diplomacy game Peacemaker, where Isreali and Palestinian youth play together, and Darfur is Dying, which provides a first-person role-play of life in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The social change sector is often slow to understand and adopt new technologies. Like public TV and documentary film before them, there needs a concerted and informed effort to create a public space for this new media. Collective strategies today will have tremendous long-term power to facilitate the development of games for the public good.

For inquiries, please see the conference website.
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*Games for Change (G4C, www.gamesforchange.org) provides support, visibility and shared resources to individuals and organizations using digital games for social change. We formed in 2004 as a sub-group of the Serious Games Initiative. The 2006 conference was developed to showcase the state of the art, evaluate outcomes achieved, and to grow the overall capacity of the sector. G4C acts as a national and international hub to help organizations network and develop videogame projects beyond their traditional expertise. Our members represent hundreds of organizations and include partners in the games industry, academia, nonprofits, local and state governments, foundations, the UN and artists.

*The New School (www.newschool.edu) is a leading progressive university comprising eight schools bound by a common, unusual intent: to prepare and inspire its 9,300 undergraduate and graduate students to bring actual, positive change to the world. Within the school, Parsons is one of the premier degree-granting colleges of art and design in the nation. Its graduates and faculty appear on the short list of outstanding practitioners in every realm of art and design — creative, management, and scholarly.

Comments

[Mark Chen]

1.

Looks like the url needs index.htm appended or their webserver needs to be set up to have default pages... maybe the default is index.html on their server?

[Bart Stewart]

2.

If anyone can stand a moment of serious criticism, I'd like to point out the childishly rude reception John McCain recently got at this New School.

What kind of useful "games for change" can come out of such a terribly imbalanced mindset that condones heckling someone you disagree with?

I support looking for ways that games can be used to help improve understanding of issues and seek solutions to problems. But doing so in a fellow-travelers environment that permits expression of only one (political) side of all issues seems guaranteed to lead to artifacts of limited utility.

I don't expect this observation to change that, but there's still a little hope in me that the TN editors who are interested in this kind of thing are serious, honorable academics who support the expression of perspectives other than their own, and will consider this point in future conferences of this type.

--Bart

[Dmitri Williams]

3.

I'm guessing that the conference organizers don't have much to do with the students' behavior--hoping so anyway. That was pretty poor, and I thought was the worst of what liberalism can offer: I disagree with you and I don't want to listen to you anymore, either, you bad person. Such intolerance is what makes "PC" a slur in many quarters and why Democrats have little shot at the red states these days. (Disclaimer: I'm independent)

I'm personally fascinated with McCain, and I just read a Slate column that I think explains why:
http://www.slate.com/id/2141974/

[Edward Castronova]

4.

What, are we supposed to not announce any event at School X because their students are boors? C'mon we can't do that. I mean, we could, but it would open us up to even more criticism.

Sometimes people do get the reputations they deserve. New School has its reputation. It's not a reputation I would want, of course. In fact, given their reputation, if I gave a talk there and got heckled, I'd be proud of myself. "Yay! Boors hate me! I am in good shape."

[Shane Murphy]

5.

"That was pretty poor, and I thought was the worst of what liberalism can offer: I disagree with you and I don't want to listen to you anymore, either, you bad person. Such intolerance is what makes "PC" a slur in many quarters and why Democrats have little shot at the red states these days."

Having attended a Commencement address this past Sunday at Western Connecticut State University by Catherine Crier and observing the boorish attempts to shout her down and boo her off the stage during her spirited defence of the US Constitution and her its sabotage by the current President, I would point out that neither "liberalism" nor "conservatism" explain people's intolerance for dissenting opinions nowdays. People become outraged far too easily by views other than their own - we need to teach students to listen and learn from those they disagree with . . . something this conference may help achieve.

[Nate]

6.

Shane>
People become outraged far too easily by views other than their own -

A good tie-in to a Lexington editorial from The Economist: the rebirth of outrage.

[Bart Stewart]

7.

It would be better not to shut out any schools from participating in get-togethers like this one, but how else do you communicate the point that they're not open enough to other ideas than by hosting the conference somewhere else? Anything else is just words, which can be ignored.

That said, my preference is still for more participation in something like this by all kinds of people, not less. It's just disheartening to think that a worthy subject will get less of a well-rounded hearing than it deserves.

Even in disagreement, by the way, I appreciate the courtesy of the responses to my comments. I sort of expected to get hammered (and still may) for coming from a place that's gotten a bit out of the mainstream here at TN, so it's really gratifying to see that there's at least one place out on the web where people with differing views can talk with each other like civilized adults.

Thanks!

--Bart

[monkeysan]

8.

Bart said: "It would be better not to shut out any schools from participating in get-togethers like this one, but how else do you communicate the point that they're not open enough to other ideas than by hosting the conference somewhere else? Anything else is just words, which can be ignored."

Edward said: "Sometimes people do get the reputations they deserve. New School has its reputation. It's not a reputation I would want, of course. In fact, given their reputation, if I gave a talk there and got heckled, I'd be proud of myself. "Yay! Boors hate me! I am in good shape."

So wait, the fact that John McCain got heckled by graduating students at a commencement speech implies that the student body is composed of 'boors' and should be banished from hosting conferences? You guys need a logic check. =P

[jiayinte]

9.

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