It is heartening to see that the concept of corporate responsibility can, at time, ooze over into the gaming industry.

At today's 2007 Games for Change Festival Microsoft announced the Xbox 360 Games for Change Challenge, a year-long game design competition for college students around the world aimed at tackling important issues through gaming.

For this first competition student developer groups will work on creating a game based on global warming using Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express software. The competition's three finalists will receive "financial compensation for education" and the winners of the competition will land an internship at Microsoft Game Studios, Jeff Bell, corporate vice president of global marketing for the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft, told me in a recent interview. He added that the final games could end up appearing on the Xbox 360 Live Arcade, Games for Windows Live Arcade or MSN Arcade, but that a final decision had yet to be made.

Bell said Microsoft officials had originally debating having several categories for this competition, ones that could explore such diverse topics as social conflict, world hunger and other global issues, but felt that the recent successes of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had made the topic of global warming particularly timely and one that often spurs passionate debate.

"We have no forgone conclusions about the approach or conclusions (the games) will make," he said. "What we really want to do is to use the vehicle of games as a way to increase education and information and engagement on the part of all different constituents."

While the competition will include more than 100 universities worldwide, Bell said they did not yet know how many teams from each university would participate. The competition will kick off in August and run through next spring, with the winners being announced at an event in Paris in August, 2008, he said.

Bell said Microsoft decided to create this competition in part out of a sense of being a good corporate citizen.

"The gaming industry is clearly a large and profitable industry," he said. "We also want to try and promote the exploration of new genres and titles."

I hope Nintendo and Sony take that as a challenge. Brian Crecente