It's worth a read — a lot of issues readers raised are brought up, such as "What's wrong with games as simply entertainment? If you want intellectual stimulation, why not turn to something else?":

Nothing is wrong with viewing games as entertainment, but there is so much more that could be done! Games have the capability to be incredibly experiential because of their capability to provide interactivity.

As designer Dan Cook from Lost Garden wrote, it's the difference between hearing about the time someone decided not to pull the trigger, and deciding for yourself not to pull the trigger. Actually going through experiences yourself is much more compelling and personal than reading a story. The opportunities are too ripe not to pursue the possibilities.

Additionally, it's sad for someone who loved games while they were younger to have to turn away later in life because the days become busier. Other activities, sports for example, are still viewed as a worthwhile use of time, but only because of some other benefit in addition to being entertainment, such as exercise.

Video games also have the capability to provide the same kind of peripheral benefit. This doesn't mean entertainment should be shown the door, but I think even popularizing the idea that games could be something more is a good step.

He also appends a challenge at the end, a game design competition — it's pretty open-ended, and you can find more information at his blog.

A Response to 'Outgrowing Games', With A Bonus Competition

This year was apparently a record year, with entries up across the board for a total of 226 entries in the main competition (up 30% from last year) and 145 for the student showcase (up 15%). On the entires, there was this to say for both parts of the competition:

Examples of the entries span already announced indie titles, including Jason Rohrer's Between, alternate reality RPG Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, visually lush point and click adventure Machinarium, and art-game I Wish I Were The Moon, through previously little-discussed titles such as Pieces Interactive's "first walk'em up" Walkie Tonky, new Nifflas-designed title Night Game, and Lexaloffle's "ecological action game" Conflux.

... a great diversity of student-made games with original concepts are showcased, with examples including GumBeat, in which you "...blow bubble gum and gather enough supporters to your cause to topple the anti-gum government", High Moon, a "abstract post-apocalyptic zombie western robot romance in 3 acts", and It's MimeTime, in which "you are a female mime artist in Paris, who must earn as much as possible, by miming your way through an invisible maze."

Both the '09 main competition entries and the student showcase entrants are available for viewing; I'll be looking forward to the final results.

2009 IGF Announces Record Entries For Main, Student Competitions [GameSetWatch]

Considering the creators describe it as "more like an explorable painting than an actual game," this is no mean feat. They cover all the typical stuff (what went wrong, what went right), as well as download statistics, appendices featuring the people behind the game, and a section on reviews:

Overall, the reactions to the game (gathered from the articles, their comments sections and personal messages), fall into three categories.

Of course there is the expected response of the typical gamers whose desire for zombies whenever they see a cemetery is apparently insatiable. They tended to describe The Graveyard as "boring". Of course.

A little bit up the ladder of human civilisation, we find the people who were turned on by the idea but turned off by the actual experience. They were "disappointed". From what we can see, this was either caused by a failure on our part to maximize the qualities of the game or by certain expectations coming from the player.

Despite the fact that games are supposed to be interactive, many gamers still seem to be incredibly passive when it comes to the meaning of their entertainment. They expect to be spoonfed and don't seem to have any experience with literature, modern theater or fine art (or even art films) which require active participation, not just of thumbs and index fingers but also of heart and brain.

A final type of response was the simply "delighted" one. These people really enjoyed the game. And/or they were happy to see the experimentation that we're doing with the medium.

Ok, they sound a touch bitter at times, but it's a really nice piece on an interesting game — and worth wading through to read.

Postmortem: Tale of Tales' The Graveyard [Gamasutra]

I'll be speaking on a panel about the relationship of video games and real world violence with Columbine Super Massacre RPG creator Danny Ledonne and occasional Kotaku contributor Bob Denerstein.

Ledonne and I have a long history: I was the first person to speak with him on the record, for the Rocky Mountain News, later I interviewed him about the Dawson shooting and then broke the news of his game being pulled from the Slamdance Game Festival. While Ledonne and I haven't always seen eye-to-eye, I've always found his take on things thoughtful and interesting. So the discussion should be as well.

The details for the talk can be found on the link.

Events: Deadly Games: Echoes of Columbine [Denver Film Festival]

There are dozens of ways to express the same thing in a language, depending on the circumstances and ways the speaker wishes to interact with their surroundings. In comparison, video games have far less choices but that does not rule out calling them ‘tiny languages’. Their size then being directly proportional to the number of options given to a player. It can be tough to pick up on this in a mostly linear game like God of War because it has so few options that one can’t really appreciate the ‘games as language’ argument. That’s a game that falls under Hideo Kojima’s ‘games as museums’ design theory, and is more about delivering a series of set experiences that the player roleplays through. On the other hand, games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Far Cry 2 on a greater level represent enough choices compounded together that the first indications of a language start to form.

Jeffries notes in the comments that this is sort of the converse of something that Ian Bogost has written extensively on — the ability of games to communicate at masses of people.

Games as Language Systems [PopMatters]

Prof Stone said: "If our research proves that it works come 2009 we will start trying it out on real soldiers.

"It could be rolled out across all the services. It would be Brit soldiers who would benefit."

He explained: "In very basic layman's terms it is a computer game with smell.

"The smell system we are currently conducting research into is very new.

"We are looking into whether it is worth doing, to introduce smell into our games training. We need to make sure it is going to help troops and is not just a gimmick.

The scientists are also looking into defence mental health, with Prof Stone adding: "Smell is so closely linked to emotion and memory, it's something that we need to take seriously.

"We have got a number of virtual environments already in place and are now adding smells to it to see what effect it has on training."

Prof Stone also thinks the device could be up for sale for the general public in a number of years.

As Kieron Gillen of Rock, Paper, Shotgun noted, we can hope this technology makes its way to a wider audience, "if only as it’ll allow us to claim that a game stinks in a more literal sense."

British soldiers could be trained on a computer game with smell [The Telegraph via Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Who cares if games are played by an older audience? That doesn’t guarantee that it will become a truly respectable medium. Ian Bogost, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, wrote that games will not be truly expected as a medium until there are more boring games.

Only when games are mundane enough to be accepted as a method to, say, teach us how to drive safely, will games have truly arrived. While the goal isn’t to create boring games, the goal is to approach a world and a public perception where boring games are not outlandish.

So how do we get there? One step at a time. Games like My Weight Loss Coach, or independent titles such as Passage are slowly, one by one, changing the public’s conception of games.

As new titles appear that push the envelope of what people, like my mother, think of as games, we approach an environment where emotional and intellectual discourse is possible.

I don't really agree with him on a number of levels — and don't really like conflating 'serious purpose' with 'maturity,' for it's possible to have wildly entertaining things that are also extremely mature in their handling of a variety of stiuations — but it's one perspective on the issue. I'm also not at all convinced a game like My Weight Loss Coach is changing perspectives on games, per se — many people I know don't make the connection between that sort of 'game' and, say, an RPG or FPS.

Why A Game Designer Outgrew Video Games [GameSetWatch]

... Setting a videogame in a modern setting is still going to raise the issue of tastelessness. Proper writing, mature mission themes, and engaging in conduct that isn’t wanton destruction are all going to be necessary. If you’re going to talk about mature topics, you have to handle them maturely and hope that resonates with the audience. Another issue raised is simply why bother at all? Why set a video game in a modern global conflict or historical moment that could be a blatant glorification of violence in some atrocious setting? Because raising awareness alone is a laudable goal. Going back to Rambo 4 for a moment, the movie managed to accomplish several amazing things despite its incredible violence. It raised awareness of the Myanmar situation so that aid and care were given to an otherwise ignored problem. Karen rebels received an incredible morale boost from the film and even use one of the quotes as a battle cry. A less action-based example, Hotel Rwanda came out ten years after the event but its success forced people to learn about an atrocity that was otherwise ignored. How many teens, how many potential activists, could be informed and contacted by playing a video game about an event? No matter what they’re doing in the game, how you frame and discuss the events they interact with will still control their impressions. Yes, there is potential for abuse here, but there is also great potential for good.

Worth a read, as most of Jeffries' essays are.

Relevant Settings [Moving Pixels]

Estamos Pensando [We Are Thinking] [wall jump explained]

Politics, if we take the word seriously, refers to the actual executive and legislative effort that our elected officials partake in to alter and update the rules of our society. In an ideal representative democracy, the one leads to the other, but in contemporary society the two are orthogonal.

Ironically, this is exactly where video games would find their most natural connection to political speech.

When we make video games, we construct simulated worlds in which different rules apply.

To play games involves taking on roles in those worlds, making decisions within the constraints they impose, and then forming judgments about living in them.

Video games can synthesize the raw materials of civic life and help us pose the fundamental political question, What should be the rules by which we live?

It's a nice roundup of the spectrum of election- and politics-related games, and Bogost has some interesting thoughts on where the 'serious games' industry could perhaps head next.

Persuasive Games: The Birth and Death of the Election Game [Gamasutra]

The Eighties were an exciting time for video games, as graphics and computing power increased to the point where games started to become visually appealing and interactive. Educational games from that decade in particular taught teachers, parents, students, and designers things that are still influencing titles today.

Thanks to the wonders of the web, the original versions of these games are often available online, and there are discs and ports to other platforms floating around as well. Playing the original versions, while nostalgic, also helps remind us what made these games important. Some things they taught us were good (learning can be fun when presented properly). Some things, not so good (skill and drill only gets you so far, even in a game). Read on for a trip down memory lane, a discussion of each game’s significance, and some locations to try out versions for free.

Fun trip back if you're of a certain generation. Stuff like Oregon Trail seems to have taken on a life of its own, and plenty of the other games listed had long lives (and perhaps are still kicking via spiritual successors?).

The Top 10 Most Influential Educational Video Games from the 1980s [Educational Games Research via GameSetWatch]

Distancing the work from the “entertainment” of popular games is fine, but even the most artsy, obscure and difficult works must connect with an audience somehow. I am not sure a system of rules by itself is the best method to achieve that. If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?

None of this is to say that a system of rules cannot be of artful construction. I have no doubt that, if we wished it and worked for it, we could at some point have departments at forward-thinking arts colleges devoted to the creation of not-very-representational rule systems as art. This might make some of us feel better about ourselves— that there is a recognized, serious side to our medium.

But I can’t help but think something like that would be a Pyrrhic victory, with “art games” sharing space in an airless pantheon next to twelve-tone music or hypertext novellas while the rest of the world goes on listening to primordial melodies and timeworn stories reinvented in the style of the day.

Zing! I think there are definitely 'arty' games out there that are compelling, but there's plenty of crap masquerading under the guise of 'art' as well ('Oh, heaven forbid we should be entertaining!'). I'm a bit tired of the 'games of art' debate, but this is a different tack on the issue — there are already a couple of good comments, too, and I'm hoping to see more of those. I have my own suspicions on what future historians of the game industry will have to say about the 'art' status debate, decades down the line, but we'll have to wait a while for that.

Tell Me What Art Is, and I’ll Tell You What Games Are [GameSetWatch]

The Power of Tangential Learning [Edge]

So when I received creator Dogwood Alliance's announcement I took them up on their offer to answer questions. Explain to me, I asked as nicely as I'm probably capable of, how your game, a straight port of Pac-Man with some colors changed, represents "saving forest creatures by collecting excessive packaging and recycling it?" They were kind enough to reply, citing the opening sequence and the end-of level "call to action" petition. They also pointed me to environmental blog Gristmill's mention of the game, which generally mirrors my opinion. So many missed opportunities. I may have built a reputation for taking pleasure from negative reviews of serious games, but I'd really much rather write positive ones. I just never seem to get the opportunity to do so.

As he points out, the short page on the creator's website does a much better job of informing the audience than the game, which does very little informing at all. 'If the two pages of text on a webpage offers so much more rich and subtle information than a game, then why bother with the game?' he asks. Why indeed — I've played some interesting 'serious games,' but really, a mere Pac-man clone does not a 'serious game' make. At least, not an effective one.

Packaging Man: Skip the Wrapper and the Game [Water Cooler Games]

When we acknowledge videogames as a medium, the notion of a monolithic games industry, which creates a few kinds of games for a few kinds of players, stops making any sense. As does the idea of a demographic category called “gamers” who are the ones who play these games.

The point is not whether games qualify as art or not. Nor whether games are useful tools or not. Rather, the point is that there are lots of other things people can and do accomplish with videogames. Some are well-established, like entertainment, and some are emerging, like meditation. No matter, all of those uses taken together make the medium stronger and give it greater longevity.

I'd quibble with some of his assertions on books (We don't distinguish between 'serious' and 'entertaining' books? C'mon Ian, you can't possibly believe that — and if you do, I've got a couple of bookshelves I'd like you to see), but it's an interesting essay on the wide and varied uses of games — and what that may mean for the industry.

The End of Gamers [Edge Online via Water Cooler Games]

Pandemic 2 [CrazyMonkeyGames via IndieGames]

A new report has been released on the utility of 'serious games' and in-game marketing in virtual spaces like Second Life; OTOinsights, the research arm of One to One Interactive, takes a look at the success (or lack thereof) of marketing attempts by major firms. They describe the results as 'uneven' and make some suggestions on how companies can better utilize virtual spaces to pitch their product(s):

"Serious games" refers to the use of games and game technologies for non-entertainment purposes. Traditionally, the education, health, and military sectors were the primary actors in this domain, but in the past few years, marketing has arisen as a major sub-domain of this area. Examples range from the selling of advertising inside video games to dozens of small, experimental corporate-sponsored spaces in virtual worlds such as Second Life, to the fully realized first-person shooter America's Army, developed as a recruitment tool for the U.S. Army. The results have been uneven, as most of these early efforts have had an experimental edge. This report releases findings that compare player engagement in some of Second Life's most successful user-generated areas compared with some of the more ambitious corporate-sponsored efforts in Second Life.

From Worlds In Motion:

In its study, the firm noted that overall, the top user-generated sites are more popular than the top corporate sites in Second Life. "Perhaps the explanation for this disparity is that corporate sites offer different content or experiences than user-generated sites, and builders of user-generated sites are more effective at offering the content users want. Or perhaps the corporate sites offer similar content, and the reason is that Second Life users are simply resisting corporate influence as a part of their hipster ethos."

Oh, snap. Starbucks, we don't want your kind here.

Serious Games for Marketing [One to One Interactive via Worlds In Motion]

Video games often face a challenge: what does playing a game do to people in the world? In the case of entertainment games, such a question asks about the effects of violence on players, or about how players find and evaluate meaning in games.

In training, advertising, and learning games, the question asks how players take knowledge they learned in a game and apply it in their daily lives. The motivational (and compulsive) aspects of games suggest other ways gameplay can influence behavior. But such matters cover only part of the intersection between our game lives and our ordinary lives ....

Performativity in discourse produces action. Performativity in video games couple gameplay to real-world action. Performative gameplay describes mechanics that change the state of the world through play actions themselves, rather than by inspiring possible future actions through coersion or reflection.

The performative aspects of games go far beyond 'serious' games, and Bogost has a number of interesting examples — good reading for a lazy weekend.

Persuasive Games: Performative Play [Gamasutra]

Chris Plante has posted a plea over at GameSetWatch — one for bringing more global entertainment to the West (well, America specifically). His idea? Some sort of portal that will be able to showcase games from all over the world, dragging American gamers kicking and screaming into acknowledging foreign countries that are outside of East Asia. Interesting concept, and one that could theoretically be implemented right now:

I’m discussing a middle ground, not just for poverty stricken countries, but for nations that simply have trouble getting their mainstream entertainment to viewers across the globe. I’ve gotten worked up over the social change these games might bring, but on a smaller scale, world games will allow for our culture to experience other cultures vis-à-vis how they entertain themselves. For example, when was the last time you played a game from Yugoslavia or even Greece?

Gamers often do amazing things together. We solve petty crimes, we help one another in times of need, and we (read: Cheapy D) foster truly awesome causes, like Cheapy D.’s and Kevin Stewart’s campaign to donate games to soldiers in Iraq. Why not make this world game portal work?

On the other hand (and maybe it's just my accumulated bitterness about being in an area studies ghetto), I'm not sure many people care. Would people — enough people to support this sort of portal idea — be interested in games from South Africa? Certainly Chinese and Korean MMOs that are arriving in the US in ever greater numbers seem to frequently be met with a snort of derision from US gamers ('Oh god, not another one'). I like the idea in theory — giving wider access to independent media from around the world is indeed a worthy cause — but I wonder how many people would cheerfully push themselves outside of their comfort zone and give it a try, checking their condescension at the door.

Why We Play - "Wanted: World Games" [GameSetWatch]

SoftWhere 2008 videos [Grand Text Auto]

Tale of Tales has an interesting little interview up with Takayoshi Sato, who was responsible for the art and CGI direction of Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2; after relocating to the US, Sato did art for some big titles, then made the switch to 'serious games.' On making the switch, he has this to say:

I feel that games are being standardized into only a few formats lately: FPS, RTS, MMO, 3rd Person Action and Sports. There’s a tendency to create the same games over and over with only a visual upgrade. And the only thing artists are supposed to do is “be professional” and gift wrap the same game elements with a pretty new skin.

Then I encountered serious games. Despite of the downsides -small budgets, clients to satisfy, etc- serious games allow us to convey social messages, for instance. There hasn’t been an opportunity for deep story telling yet. But even making a game about behavior changes in the context of social problems, seems a little more creative than just making more and more weapon concepts. I find it hard to like games that only provide a “kill kill kill” experience. Since serious games are in their infancy, I thought it might be a great place to seek future possibilities. I hope that very interesting things will happen down the road.

It's brief, but has some good thoughts on art in games and where Sato's headed next. On the serious games front, he sounds like a man after Ian Bogost et al's hearts.

Interview with Takayoshi Sato [Tale of Tales via GameSetWatch]

We've mentioned Jason Rohrer's weird little works before, in the form of Passage and Gravitation; now with his 'Game Design Sketchbook' column at the Escapist, he puts up new little games monthly. This month features the theme of life, death, and immortality (appropriately called Immortality):

We generally assume that immortality is good, just as we assume that death is bad. Of course, universal immortality (all six billion of us) would be physically impractical. But what about individual immortality? What about for you? If you could become immortal, would you?

Immortality is a game about that question, and it's also about the converse of that question: Does death have some fundamental value that we usually ignore?

Immortality [The Escapist]

I poked my head in to the public 'pecha kucha' session for UCSD's SoftWhere 2008, but couldn't stay for the whole thing since I had a paper to write and was feeling really under the weather; I did get a chance later to talk with one of my professors, who participated in the event, and have been checking out the roundups floating around the internet at this point. I've got my own opinions on the '___ Studies' ghetto, being part of it myself — though an attempt to create a field of 'software studies' is, at the very least, not burdened with Cold War politics. Anyways, there are some concise (and not so concise) appraisals of the event floating around. Anne Helmond, who presented on the relationship between search engines and the blogosphere, had this to say:

The title of the workshop ‘SoftWhere’ embodies the question of demarcating an area of study. Our current society is penetrated by and shaped by software and should thus be subject to appropriate critique. The ubiquity of software has led to a software culture and we are now living in a software society. What does it mean to live in such a software society instead of an industrial society? A world which is created by software is opaque and that is why we need to study software. We should question the streams behind, embedded in and woven through our society and look at what is happening behind the screens. SoftWhere? SoftEverywhere!

Liz Losh has a much longer and detailed explanation of the various presentations, of which there were a great many, spanning a lot of subjects, over at virtualpolitik. I've heard videos of the presentations might pop up in the future — considering the bite-sized nature of the presentations, I hope they do. And the format of confining academics to six minutes and forty seconds of presentation time? Brilliant.

SoftWhere 2008: Software Studies Workshop [Anne Helmond] & Speed Dating [virtualpolitik]

The bus, the woman told Gasperini, had been provided by the Nicaraguan government, and she had relied on it as her only means of visiting her sister. The Contras - anti-government guerillas funded by the U.S. - had destroyed the bus. The woman, passionate about American democracy, told Gasperini that if he could just tell everyone back in the States about what had happened to her bus, Americans would vote to help, the Contras would cease their attacks, and she could travel to her sister's again.

Touched by her plight and by her faith, Gasperini wondered what he could do to disseminate information about the Contra situation. In the end, he decided to do what he did best: Make a game.

That game, a 1989 mouse-and-keyboard HyperCard adventure on an 800k floppy disk, was titled Hidden Agenda, and it was a huge critical success, discussed on All Things Considered and in Newsweek, among others. Incidentally, the face of the man in the screenshot was modeled on Gasperini's apartment doorman.

Games For Change is an organization developed to support academics, activist groups, educators and the non-profit sector in creating games that act as agents of social change. At the organization's 2008 event in New York, panel moderator Celia Pearce introduced Gasperini, as well as another of the first social game designers, Balance of Power creator Chris Crawford, who's also credited with instigating an informal event in his living room in 1987 that would grow to become the Game Developers' Conference we know today.

The idea of developing games for other audiences than the core gamer, and with other goals than simple entertainment, is often hailed as a "new" phenomenon, as is the idea that games will "one day" be treated in the mainstream as a serious and valuable pursuit. But Gasperini and Crawford are notable for beginning this work long before there was a game console in every home.

"In digital culture, people always assume that they're doing something for the first time when in fact that is very seldom the case," said Pearce.

In fact, back in 1985, Gasperini met Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins, still leading the company in its earlier days, and received some advice from him on being successful in the industry: Make a game that your dad would want to play.

Gasperini's Dad loved Face The Nation and 60 Minutes, so at the time, Hidden Agenda definitely fit the bill. Years later, though, Gasperini met up with Hawkins again during the time when EA was specializing in sports sims. They had just released a volleyball game titled Lords of the Beach, and so Gasperini asked him: whatever happened to making games for Dad?

"Well," laughed Hawkins, "My Dad likes watching girls in bikinis playing beach volleyball."

Crawford's 1985 game Balance of Power, a geopolitical simulator where the object was to prevent a war, actually preceded (and helped inspire) Hidden Agenda. But Crawford said that if it wasn't for massive economic losses in a game industry that looked to be about to tank, no one would ever have published his title, which decades later still inspires activist groups to develop social games.

"People only change when they're in pain," said Crawford, explaining why MindScape, a startup publisher, was willing to pick up his game after Atari's collapse left the industry "at death's door." EA, Broderbund and the era's other market leaders took a pass, he said.

Crawford and Gasperini both have faith, though, that a new game industry can be built alongside the existing one, to build games that provoke thought on world issues, that educate and encourage activism. It'll take time, though.

"It's a slow, steady process," said Crawford. "No industry develops suddenly. You have to develop public awareness of it. I figure it'll take at least five years for this to get off the ground, maybe 10 years before we have a real industry."

And unless the game industry ever finds itself in such dire straits again, Crawford said it's still unlikely that social games will ever reach success through commercial channels. "The games industry is creatively dead," said Crawford. "It is 'marketingly mature'. They know exactly who they're selling and the people they're selling to... You're not going to wreak any major changes in this industry."

[You can see the games discussed at the links provided in this article.]

The goal is to fare well and advance socially and economically, with players advancing from “tourists” to “residents” and finally to “citizens” of modern China. At the different stages, players encounter quests, have access to learning materials – including live Chinese tutors – and can organize and participate in social activities.

Among the many tasks players can complete in the tourist stage are ordering a taxi, exchanging currency and checking into a hotel in China.

“Games are supposed to be fun and educational,” Zhao said. “With this one, we have struck a good balance.”

I wonder if the Zon! cabbies are as chatty as the guys in Shanghai or Taipei. It's a neat idea for facilitating language acquisition — if only it weren't in hateful jiantizi.

Virtual China: Online game teaches Chinese culture, language [MSU Today]

This year, Games For Change kicks off the event with a MacArthur Foundation-funded one-day workshop aimed at non-profit professionals, to teach them how to make games about social issues. On June 3, Microsoft will host the event's Expo Night, which showcases serious games from designers around the world competing for recognition in the Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup, which the company announced last year. The challenge to designers asks them to develop games themed around supporting a sustainable environment.

The United Nations will also present games it created, including games about malaria prevention, water conservation and global poverty, and various other non-profit organizations are set to offer demonstrations as well.

Full announcement follows the jump. I'll be covering portions of the event next week, and I can't wait to play the Malaria Game! — In sincerity, I attended Games For Change last year and am looking forward to this year's, which looks much bigger than before!

Games for Change Fifth Annual Festival ­ June 2-4, 2008 Hosted by PARSONS The New School for design

Keynote Addresses by The Honorable Sandra Day O'Connor and Leading Game Scholars Dr. James Paul Gee and Henry Jenkins

New One-Day Workshop Funded by the MacArthur Foundation Teaches Non-Profit Professionals How to Make Social Issue Games, With a Major New Announcement From the AMD Foundation

Expo Night To Feature Microsoft Environmental Games Contest Finalists From Around the World

NEW YORK, May 20, 2008 ­ The nonprofit organization Games for Change presents its fifth annual festival in New York City, June 2-4, 2008 hosted by Parsons The New School for Design. The festival brings together leading non-profit organizations, game scholars, and industry experts to explore and expand the role of digital games as agents of social change and showcases some of the hottest new games in development during a special game expo. Highlights of the festival include a closing keynote by the Honorable Justice Sandra Day O¹Connor, and a one-day workshop funded by the MacArthur Foundation designed to teach non-profit professionals how to use games to fulfill their social issue missions. The AMD Foundation will also be making a major announcement on this day about a new education initiative involving social issue games.

³Now in our fifth year, the Games for Change festival is proud to have brought attention to games as a means to promote social impact initiatives,² said Suzanne Seggerman, President and Co-founder of Games for Change. ³This year¹s festival continues to showcase the best practices of social issue game design while increasing the accessibility of games among educators, non-profit leaders, philanthropic entities and others through new programs like the one-day workshop.²

This year¹s festival will feature two keynote addresses focusing on the vision and future of the public interest game community, beginning with a joint address by Dr. James Paul Gee of Arizona State University and Henry Jenkins of MIT on June 3. Both Gee and Jenkins are the leading scholars on learning and interactive media and joint advisors to MIT¹s Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. On June 4, the Honorable Justice Sandra Day O'Connor will speak about a new interactive civics education project she is developing in partnership with Dr. Gee.

Now in its third year hosting the Games for Change Festival, The New School recently deepened its relationship with the organization through the launch of PETLab, the first public interest game design and research laboratory for interactive media. Supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the lab connects the work of the public and private sector with educators and designers to build an overall framework for design as a learning activity. MORE ³Through the development of PETLab, Parsons and Games for Change are supporting the next generation of social impact game designers while encouraging the real-world application of these games,² said New School President Bob Kerrey, who will deliver opening remarks at the keynote speech by Justice Sandra Day O¹Connor. ³This incubator fulfills the university¹s mission to strengthen the connections between design and the social sciences.²

The June 3 Expo Night, hosted by Microsoft, will showcase the latest social issues games in development. Microsoft will present games designed by finalists in the ³Xbox 360 Games for Change Challenge². The designers, flown in from around the world, will present their games. As part of Microsoft¹s Imagine Cup Competition, this nationwide, socially responsible game initiative was launched at last year¹s Expo to challenge game designers to use technology to support a sustainable environment. There will also be a showcase of games created by the United Nations, including games about malaria prevention, water conservation, and global poverty. Other non-profits will display games on immigration, Hurricane Katrina and ³playing the news.² PETLab will also participate in the Expo.

This year¹s festival features the addition of a full day of programming on June 2nd dedicated to helping non-profits utilize gaming technology to fulfill their mission of social service. Titled ŒLet the Games Begin: A 101 Workshop on Making Social Issue Games,¹ the workshop is one of 17 winners out of more than 1000 applicants of the MacArthur Foundation¹s DML (Digital Media and Learning) Competition. This workshop provides hands-on sessions by notable figures in the field on the fundamentals of social issue games featuring leading experts on topics including game design, fundraising, evaluation, youth participation, distribution, and press strategies. 101 Workshop is sponsored by the AMD Foundation, a leading technology corporation which is announcing a major new philanthropic initiative on this day.

Throughout the festival, panels will address hot-button topics as such as impact assessment, games and journalism, funding challenges and public media initiatives. Featured panelists including: game designers Jim Gasperini (Hidden Agenda), Chris Crawford (Balance of Power and Balance of the Planet), and Ken Eklund (creator of World Without Oil); Dr. Michael Levine, director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center; Shelley Pasnick, director of the Center for Children and Technology; Mary Flanagan, director of the Tiltfactor Lab; Tracy Fullerton, director of the USC Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab; and representatives from Participant Productions, the MacArthur and Knight Foundations, PBS, and Electronic Arts, among many others. The full festival agenda is available at http://www.gamesforchange.org/conference/2008/program.php.

Games for Change (http://www.gamesforchange.org) provides support, visibility and shared resources to individuals and organizations using digital games for social change, with special assistance to non-profits and foundations entering the field. Called ³the Sundance of Videogames² for ³socially-responsible game-makers², G4C acts as the international nexus and primary community of practice for public interest games, and includes hundreds of organizations and individuals in the nonprofit sector, industry, academia, government, and the arts.

PETLab (Protyping, Evaluating, Teaching and Learning Laboratory) a joint project of Games for Change and Parsons The New School for Design, was launched in December 2007 through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation's digital media and learning initiative. PETLab develops new games, simulations, and play experiences which encourage experimental learning and investigation into social and global issues. It is a place for testing prototyping methods and the process of collaborative design with organizations interested in using games as a form of public interest engagement.

The New School (www.newschool.edu ) is a leading progressive university comprising eight schools all poised to prepare undergraduate and graduate students to effect lasting change in the world. Part of the university, Parsons The New School for Design is one of the premier degree-granting colleges of art and design in the nation. Its graduates and faculty appear on the shortlist of outstanding practitioners in every realm of art and design.

The 2008 Fifth Annual Games for Change Festival is sponsored by the AMD Foundation, Games for Windows, Microsoft, Parsons the New School for Design, and Xbox 360.

It's about taking advantage of the burgeoning video game trend instead of attacking it, said Deborah Lieberman Ph.D., communications researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara, during the organization's announcement conference today.

"Research has shown you can learn whatever a video game offers. The question is, what are you going to teach?" said Lieberman.

12 universities were awarded $200,000 grants for innovative research concepts that will either develop new games or use existing commercial games to address specific health issues across all areas of the population. An MMO designed to help alcoholics learn relapse prevention and a social mobile game that would teach healthy eating habits to adolescents are just a couple of the winning ideas - one of them even involves Crazy Taxi.

The primary goal of the research, as Lieberman said, is to build a strong evidence base to better understand how games can serve as a springboard to health behavior change, and the Foundation's Chinwe Onyekere said her organization felt it important to invest in these ideas, given the need for evidence to compel the field forward. The Foundation is investing $8.25 million in the Health Games Research national program, for these and additional grants in the future.

"We're a portfolio looking 10 and 20 years down the road, hoping we can really make an impact on the future of health and healthcare. We are keenly aware of how video games are in homes, crossing socioeconomic status backgrounds, with young and old playing games," said Onyekere.

Lieberman said that anecdotal evidence in support of games as health tools abound, from stories of Wii Bowling nights at senior centers to Dance Dance Revolution and the EyeToy being used to help people in physical rehabilitation regain balance and mobility. Lieberman is also enthusiastic about the potential offered by Wii Fit, but the benefit of games reaches beyond body movement "exergaming" — games make useful motivators and behavioral teaching tools, too, she said.

"A game involves a challenge to reach a goal - that's why we love to play them. It makes us want to do better, and we take pleasure in succeeding. Stroke victims work harder and reach further in rehab when they have a game environment in which to try out their skills." They stop thinking about their pain, she said, and think about goals instead, to "tremendous results."

The 12 grantees, chosen from 112 entrants, will lead one- to two-year studies centered on their proposal. The full list is as follows:

Cornell University, Department of Communication (Ithaca, NY) - Mindless Eating Challenge is a mobile phone game for younger adolescents that rewards their good health habits and food choices. The study will investigate how strategies of persuasion in a game can promote healthy behaviors in daily life. The game uses eating tips, mobile phone snapshots of food that players plan to eat, nurturing of virtual characters and feedback from the system and from peers to promote good nutrition and healthy lifestyles.

Indiana University, School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation (Bloomington, IN) - BloomingLife: The Skeleton Chase is an alternative reality game designed to promote physical activity and healthy lifestyles among college freshmen. It involves an interactive fictional story (a mystery that takes eight weeks to solve) unfolding across a variety of media (e-mail, Web sites, phone calls from fictional characters, physiological monitoring) and real-world physical and mental challenges that players must surmount to gather clues. The study will compare the impacts of competitive versus collaborative game versions.

Maine Medical Center (Portland, ME) - Family-Based Exergaming with Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) will identify impacts of the popular dance pad game on families with at least one overweight child, aged 9 to 17. Participating families will be randomly assigned to receive the DDR game or a pedometer. The study will assess, over time, players’ amount, type and enjoyment of physical activity, quality of life, body mass index and body composition. It also will examine family dynamics in the activities they do together and factors that influence their motivation to be physically active.

Union College, Department of Psychology (Schenectady, NY) - Seniors Cyber-Cycling with a Virtual Team: Effects on Exercise Behavior, Neuropsychological Function and Physiological Outcomes is a randomized, clinical trial designed to identify individual and situational factors that influence exercise behaviors and health outcomes in community-dwelling older adults, aged 50+. The system combines a stationery bicycle with FitClub cardiovascular exergame software, which uses a touch screen to provide individualized feedback to the player and a three-dimensional virtual environment for exercise that can be shared with other players competitively or collaboratively.

University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine (La Jolla, CA) - Behavioral Choice Theory Approach to Testing Exertainment for Adolescent Physical Activity will identify health behavior change principles used in a variety of commercially available exergames and their impact on players’ physical activity levels. The study will use the Xavix system (exergames with sport equipment controllers for tennis, boxing, bowling, cardio-fitness and other sports) to assess the frequency, intensity and duration of physical activity in people aged 11 to 15 that are given a Xavix to use at home for several months. The researchers also will investigate how the social interactions that take place during game play may influence health behavior change.

University of Central Florida, College of Medicine (Orlando, FL) - Practicing Relapse Prevention in Artificial-Reality Environments: [PREPARE]: A Game-Based Therapy Maintenance Tool will investigate role-playing games designed to enable people aged 18 to 65 that are diagnosed with alcohol abuse or dependence to practice skills that can help them prevent real-world relapses. The relapse prevention games are embedded as mini-games within an extensive multiplayer online game. The study will compare behavioral and health impacts of treatment plus access to the game versus treatment without access to the game.

University of Florida, College of Public Health and Health Professions (Gainesville, FL) - Action Video Games to Improve Everyday Cognitive Function in Older Adults will explore the effects of an action-adventure driving video game (Playstation 2’s “Crazy Taxi”) on the visual attention skills of a 3 group of community-dwelling adults, aged 65 and older. The study will compare participants who play “Crazy Taxi,” those who receive a traditional visual attention training program and those who are given no training at all. It will evaluate visual attention performance and cognitive speed and skills, as well as investigate how players’ levels of engagement in the game may influence their motivation to carry out the visual attention training program. University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill, School of Public Health (Chapel Hill, NC) - Presence: Predicting Sensory and Control Effects of Console Video Games in Young Adults will investigate motivations to expend energy during video game play for people aged 18 to 35. The study will compare physiological measures of energy expenditure while people play traditional video games (those that involve pushing buttons on a standard game controller or on a Wii motion-sensing controller) versus active video games (those that require physical movement, using inputs such as a dance pad, balance board or guitar). It also will explore players’ sense of being present in the game and their intrinsic motivation to play, two factors that are known to increase the amount of time people will spend playing a game. This is the first time that research will identify impacts of these factors on players’ energy expenditure; study results may lead to recommendations for making traditional games more active and active games more compelling.

University of South Carolina Research Foundation (Columbia, SC) - Commercially Available Interactive Video Games for Individuals with Chronic Mobility and Balance Deficits Post-Stroke will investigate the potential of physical activity video games to serve as innovative, cost-effective ways to help people recover motor skills after experiencing a stroke. The study will compare the effects of two video game systems (Wii and EyeToy) on players’ mobility, balance and fear of falling.

University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts (Los Angeles, CA) - Effectiveness of Social Mobile Networked Games in Promoting Active Lifestyles for Wellness will use cell phones and the Web to deliver “Wellness Partners,” a character-driven social mobile networked game, to children and adults aged 12 to 44. The game is designed to motivate real-world wellness through a player support system that involves family members and friends, and by incorporating elements from virtual pets, roleplaying games and online social networking. A single-player version provides a fictional game character that offers encouragement, reminders, progress checking and communication with others. The multiplayer version allows players to enlist members of their social network to be partners or helpers. The study will examine how various components of the game may motivate healthy behaviors.

University of Vermont, School of Medicine (Burlington, VT) - Breath Biofeedback Video Game for Children with Cystic Fibrosis will explore whether a breath biofeedback video game can improve cystic fibrosis patients’ self-administration of inhaled medicines, engagement in respiratory exercises and awareness of their respiratory status. The game uses a breath controller and game software developed by the research team in collaboration with patients in the target user group. In addition to potentially helping cystic fibrosis patients self-manage their condition and maintain better health, the game may also be useful for children and adults with asthma and other forms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

University of Washington, School of Medicine (Seattle, WA) - Video Games for Dietary Behavior Change and Improved Glycemic Control in Diabetes will investigate health impacts of online mobile mini-games for people with type 2 diabetes, aged 18 and older. The games are designed to help players attain better blood sugar control by improving their ability to estimate carbohydrates and calories in food portions and by improving their eating habits. In addition to assessing the impact of the games on dietary knowledge and food choices, the study will explore effects of two game design strategies: tailoring and tethering. Tailoring involves customizing a game to meet an individual player’s preferences and goals. Tethering involves embedding a learning task within the strategies that players must use to win a game.

The $1,000 winning design "Escape Your Boyfriend's Room" by Jorge Goyco is an interesting point and click game that manages to get both the warning signs of an abusive relationship across as well as how you can get yourself out of the relationship. I loved the look of the game and its approach to the subject matter really impressed me.

The first runner up $100 prize was handed out to "A Walk in the Park by Jared Sain." I loved the look of the game. My only suggestion is that maybe the game could do a better job of explaining how to get out of an abusive relationship. The final $100 runner-up was "Decisions, Decisions by Mark Kakareka"

Judges for the contest were my brother, Drew Crecente; Simon Carless, director of the Independent Games Festival; Stephen Totilo, of MTV and huge brain fame, Georgia Tech prof Ian Bogost and Dr. Elizabeth Richeson, a psychologist, Texas Psychological Association Board member, and my mom.

The winning entries were quite innovative, but more importantly I think this particular contest reiterates the mantra that video games can deal with important and delicate issues appropriately.

My understanding is that Drew plans to run the contest again next year. I hope it has just as many good entries. Hit up the site to check out the winners.

Jennifer Ann's Group

Michigan State University is hosting an interdisciplinary conference from October 9-11 called Meaningful Play, exploring "the potential of games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways." They're seeking submissions from a pretty wide swath of people: "Submissions are sought from both researchers and practitioners in academia and industry. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students are also encouraged to submit either jointly with an academic/member of industry or alone." If you've got a paper you've been sitting on, or something that will be ready by 1 July (the submission deadline), full details are below the jump [via Water Cooler Games]:

Meaningful Play 2008, which takes place October 9-11, 2008, is an interdisciplinary academic conference that explores the potential of games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways. The conference includes thought-provoking keynotes from leaders in academia and industry, peer-reviewed paper presentations, panel sessions (including academic and industry discussions), innovative workshops, roundtable discussions, and exhibitions of games.

Submissions are sought from both researchers and practitioners in academia and industry. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students are also encouraged to submit either jointly with an academic/member of industry or alone.

While any topic related to games for entertainment and learning is appropriate to submit to Meaningful Play 2008, topics of particular interest include:

1) Exploring meaningful applications of games

* Games to change attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors (including social impact games and personal health games)
* Games to stimulate creativity or innovation
* Games to build social skills
* Games to advertise (advergames) and persuade
* Games to exercise specific cognitive functions
* Games to explore personal beliefs and help make decisions
* Games to build knowledge and skills (games for learning)
* Serious games for history and cultural heritage learning

2) Issues in designing meaningful play

* Game design for specific audience segments
* Player types and play styles
* Story and storytelling in games
* Competitve and cooperative play (single player, multiplayer and massively multiplayer)
* Balancing entertainment and serious goals
* Repurposing entertainment games for serious purposes
* Unintended and unexpected effects of games
* Using psychology and neuroscience to design and understand games
* Evaluation and assessment of game impacts
* Barriers to the adoption of serious game

Submission deadline is July 1, 2008.

Complete details on Meaningful Play 2008 are available at:
http://meaningfulplay.msu.edu

The challenge: race the sun and hand out as many insecticide-treated bed nets as you can to African families. The more nets you deliver - before the mosquitoes come out - the more lives you save. Once you're done playing the game, sign up, confirm your email, and a life-saving bed net will be sent on your behalf!

I'm not going to provide an in-depth explanation for Gravitation. I'm hoping that most people will understand it as it stands. However, it involves more complex game mechanics than Passage, and it is trying to express something much more subtle .... The mechanics themselves are relatively simple, but the emergent behavior harbors a lot of texture. Know that there are no "accidents" in this game design. Everything you notice about the game, and every subtle interaction that you experience, is intentionally packed with meaning. Gravitation explores how a particular corner of my life feels, as only a game can.

It's definitely worth a quick play through; Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux versions are available.

Gravitation: a video game by Jason Rohrer

For the record, I would never go to a talk about me... unless I was invited. Nora Paul, with the University of Minnesota school of journalism's Institute of New Media Studies, emailed me over the weekend to clue me in to the talk she was doing entitled: "Being Brian Crecente: Using an Off-The-Shelf Role-Playing Game to Teach Journalism."

Actually, the whole name thing really was a last minute add-on. It sounds like Paul had been working on the idea, introducing college-level would-be journalists to the profession through a video game, for a number of years.

After playing around with a couple of different concepts, Paul said she saw a presentation Kurt Squire did about how he and his team made an American Revolution mod for Neverwinter Nights.

Paul scraped together some grant money and 20 copies of Neverwinter Nights. Using a pool of student assistants, and consultant Matt Taylor, Paul and her team rewrote the dialog trees and reworked the graphics for Neverwinter Nights to make it match their goals.

"The course objectives was to teach information gathering, synthesis and analysis," she said. "We wanted the game to let them practice (journalism) and find out the implications of their choices.

"The idea was to develop a game that would reinforce good reporting practices."

In the game, the players take on the role of a reporter (no, not me) who is covering an accident in which a train carrying anhydrous ammonia hits a truck and derails, forcing the evacuation of the surrounding neighborhood.

"We had to create the city...22 different characters," she said.

Students had to figure out what story angle they wanted to take, covering the health, public safety, transportation safety or environmental issues, before getting started. Once they figured that out that have to identify the important questions, collect the necessary background information, find the right sources and interview them, keep notes, and eventually return to the newsroom to write and file a story to the paper's website.

When Paul contacted me over the weekend, she asked what my take was on reporting, what important things had I learned over my years as a police reporter. I gave her three key lessons, which she included in her presentation and, in some sense, the game mod.

Treat people like you want to be treated.

This is one of the most important things you can learn not only in journalism, but in life. Treat people like crap and you'll get a double dose of it in return. I was happy to learn that Paul's mod incorporates attitude a bit. The game allows the questions to take essentially four forms.

They can come from a cocky journalist, a very competent reporter, a ditzy journalist or someone so tentative that they don't seem to know what they were doing.

Don't rely on the officials.
Paul said this was a tricky, but important thing to incorporate into the game. They had to make it possible for a reporter to get conflicting information from different sources and then figure out what the real, and full story is.

If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.

A famous journalism chestnut, that couldn't be more important. No matter who tells you something, never assume it's right, check and double check everything. Something that seems ingrained in the journalism training mod.

While Paul and her students seemed to like the mod, she said that Bioware didn't really cooperate much with their effort, making it nearly impossible to roll out the program to more students or larger classes. So Paul decided to transition the mod over to a different program.

Now Paul's team is working with Pine Tech's Johnson Simulation Center and a program they have called MULE.

I loved the concept of turning journalism into a video game. Funny enough, years ago when I was still a full-time police reporter I was contacted by a fairly sizable development studio who were playing around with the idea of creating a mainstream game about being a police reporter. They asked me about consulting for them.

That never went anywhere, but I've long thought that in many ways being a reporter, in particular a police reporter, is a lot like being in a role-playing game. You need to explore, talk to people, figure things out. I think that could be made into a great game.

Randy Brown of Virtual Heroes talked of the Discovery Channel's desire to create "buzz" for their $21 million mini-series Race To Mars, an investment that ultimately resulted in the Unreal Engine-powered Mission Two, one of many video games inspired by and intended to promote the mini-series. More robust than your typical Flash game, Mission Two packs a lot into its 56MB download, including online multiplayer.

"There's a lot of interest from big brands, because they feel like they're losing audience to games," said Dante Anderson of Kuma Games, a company that has worked on advergaming titles for the History Channel and Spike TV. Their method of promotion differed slightly from Virtual Heroes, with their Dog Fighters web game releasing one minute after the program first aired.

That relationship as game developer and promoter actually works both ways according to Anderson. "We won't typically do a game with a company unless they give us a little buzz," he says, with "free" television advertising one of the nice perks of working the field.

While most of the gameplay concepts weren't necessarily breaking boundaries, as Sven Vincke of Larian Studios proved when showing off his company's games, they relied on tried and true titles. Work they did for the BBC emulated—some may say ripped off—classic games like Galaga, Mario Kart and Breakout in an attempt to appeal to kids.

"Children get the crap of the family, the hand-me-down computers," Vincke said, forcing them to work in the confines of low-end spec PCs.

It may not be the most glamorous of development pursuits, but expect to see more of this type of fare, as television viewership numbers shrink and casual gamers look for more free gaming opportunities.

Hush offers a glimpse, as it were, of how vignette might be used successfully in games. As an exploration of the potential of the style, the game is a success. And as a vignette of a situation in mid-90s civil war-torn Rwanda, the game is compelling, if perhaps simplistic and overly mawkish.

The anxiety of literal death contradicts the core mechanic's demand for calm, but in a surprising and satisfying way, like chili in chocolate. The increasingly harsh sound of a baby's cry that comes with failure attenuates the player's anxiety, further underscoring the tension at work in this grave scenario.

The game itself is very short, somewhat successful (Bogost wonders if the designers had ever rocked a child to sleep, since the actual game mechanic can be somewhat jerky and on the opposite end of the spectrum from the soothing activity of singing and rocking a child to sleep), but interesting — they are successful in conveying a sense of rising panic with the need to stay calm. The game is available for download in Windows and Mac formats.

Videogame Vignette [Gamasutra] & Hush [Jamie Antonisse]

Attached at the end of the white paper is a series of three vignettes, detailing narrative form how MyBase will operate for each sector: recruiting to and inspiring the public after a recent terrorist attack with games as well as social settings; training new cadets in a virtual Squadron Officer School (vSOS) with avatars of famous historical thinkers, guest lectures at the University of Texas, and full-blown simulation of what it's like to watch an air mission from the ground in an Army M1A2 Abram; and, finally, using avatars as interaction methods for research about security issues and further training.

Ooooook. Well, they've projected plans running through 2030, so we'll see how long it takes for the USAF 2.0 to become reality.

Air Force Unveils Potential Plans for MyBase Virtual World [Virtual Worlds News]

By choosing your character's dietary and exercise habits, you can experiment with the constraints of nutrition and economics as they affect your character's general health. Will it be wheatgrass and soy? Or fried chicken at every meal? How much can you afford to spend on food, and how does that affect your general health? Characters who eat poorly will get fat. Characters who don't exercise will move around the world more laboriously. Disease and death will eventually ravage players with poor health, while those with good health will live to a ripe age.

Sounds ... weighty, on a number of levels. We'll see what public reception is like in a few days.

Prepare to Fatten [Water Cooler Games]

Gaming is changing how we communicate, how we do business, express ourselves, and meet new people. Collaborative gaming, where thousands of us are working together to create projects in game worlds like EVE Online, Second Life, A Tale in the Desert, or any number of other emerging worlds, forges new ways of playing, and new ways of learning. This is a phenomenon that is changing the world right now, and it's happening without us really noticing. Furthermore, we are, by funding games and gaming-related research, creating the 3D web, the 'metaverse' - or the grid of information that will serve us in the decades to come. Moreover we are guaranteeing the propagation of a medium that engulfs cinema, architecture, music, animation, sculpture, sport, indeed all of culture. Games are a brave new frontier of imagination, art and science, and they've only just begun.

And is that a waste of time?

It's an article that's a nice wrap up of the positives of the industry and playing games at large, and a good read through on a lazy Saturday. I'm not sure gamers will save the world, but I am quite sure we're not the pack of blood thirsty social misfits that popular media occasionally likes to paint a picture of.

How Gamers Will Save The World [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

CALL FOR PAPERS
Persuasive Technology 2008 will gather together people interested in how software and related technologies influence people's attitudes and behaviours. This conference will also feature the best new insights into how web sites, video games, and mobile phones and other applications can be designed to motivate and persuade people.

CONFERENCE AIMS
Until recently, most software applications have been developed without much thought to how they influence their users. This perspective is changing. Today persuasion matters more than ever. Now experts in industry and academics are embracing a purposeful approach to persuasive design. In an industry context, designing for persuasion is becoming essential for success. In academic settings, the study of persuasive technology illuminates the principles that influence and motivate people in different realms of life. This Persuasive 2008 Conference aims to place such work on a firm scientific footing with an emphasis on social and psychological issues as well as ethical awareness.

Persuasive technology is rapidly growing into a major discipline. The previous conferences held in Eindhoven and Stanford were infused with energetic spirit and a large attendance, with representatives from both academia and industry.

This year's conference will highlight new knowledge in the understanding and designing persuasive technology. The event will bring together researchers, practitioners, industry professionals interested in this important new field.

RESEARCH THEMES
Research themes of the conference include:
- Motivational technology
- Persuasive games
- Smart environments
- Web2.0
- Mobile persuasion
- Well-being and health behaviour
- Theory of persuasive technology
- Ethics of persuasive technology
- Social and organizational issues
-