Cooney Center Brings Learning Game Leaders to the G4C Festival

May 23, 2013 | by Catherine Jhee

If games and learning is a topic that sets your creativity reeling, then block your calendar for June 17—19th and make your way to New York City for the 10th Anniversary Games for Change Festival. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop has curated a selection of speakers and panel discussion on a wide range of games & learning topics, ranging from an investigation of Common Core standards and the goals of 21st-century skills development, role-playing in video games that places kids at the great crossroads of history, and weird, fascinating insights into the neuroscience of video game play. From education futurists to game designers, mad learning scientists and kids who are passionate about gaming, you’ll hear a wide variety of perspectives on the future of play and what it means for education and social change.

If you only have one day to spend at the Games for Change Festival, consider Wednesday, June 19th—a day focused on how the use of digital games is changing our nation’s classrooms. The day kicks off at 9:30 am with a discussion about the investment being made by publishers, scholars and philanthropic leaders to design creative technologies, especially digital games, to be a critical part of the Common Core solution. But will they deliver new breakthroughs or deliver old wine in new bottles? Three of the nation’s leading authorities on innovation in educational technology will join the debate.

From 11am – noon, educators, journalists, and ed-tech investors respond to the morning’s debate, focusing on what users of educational technology and digital games might be looking for in the year 2020.

From 2:00–3:00 pm, there will be a tough decision to make. Will you attend the presentation on the National STEM Video Game Challenge to hear from youth, nonprofit leaders, game developers, and educators about using video game design as a learning tool to engage more youth in science, technology, engineering, art, and math fields? Or will you literally delve into the depths of gaming’s effects on brain development—and how our growing knowledge about brain development affects game design?

Throughout the Festival, you will get sense of the global social impact of game-based technology. You’ll hear case studies of how games are helping young Ethiopian girls to create a larger role in society for themselves so their voices can be heard and their concerns can be addressed as well as learn how simulation games increasing sanitation and public health standards in India and Africa and paving the way to better disaster preparedness standards around the world. You’ll hear from esteemed education and gaming professional at the very tops of their fields, as well as start-up and indie developers who are working alongside educators as they create game-based products and services. How are they funded? What is their product development process? How are they faring in the open market? Find out straight from the source! There will also be a game jam, hackathon, game play session, and simulation experiment so that you can roll up your sleeves, open up your mind, and be a part of the ed tech solutions that are shaping young minds.

For a full list of speakers and topics, please view the agenda at http://www.gamesforchange.org/festival2013/program/. And if you use the code “cooney” when you register, you’ll save 15% off the fee.

We’ll see you there!

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Discover the Superhero Within You in Wonder City: Q&A With Naomi Clark

May 22, 2013 | by Meghan Ventura | Comments: 1


Wonder City, the companion game to the documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines, launched this week with the aim of changing how players visualize power and gender. Just as the documentary examines American pop culture’s attitudes toward powerful women, this online game specifically reaches out to tweens to address the very same failure of imagination and opportunity.

The pilot episode of Wonder City, which will take most players around 30 to 40 minutes to complete, is online here. It begins with player’s origin story, detailing how they end up with superpowers and how they decide to use them.

Before Wonder City‘s release, we emailed with game designer Naomi Clark about her work on the game with the documentary creators Kelcey Edwards and Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, who were recipients of the Games for Change Fellowship offered by the Tribeca Film Institute.

What changed the most in Wonder City from the initial concepts and prototypes to the finished product?

When we first started working on the concept for Wonder City, we knew that we wanted to make a game that would complement Wonder Women!, the documentary. The original idea was also a story-driven game of characters and choices, but it was a more traditional superhero tale starring an adult superheroine trying to balance work, family, and social life alongside the responsibility of her powers—a little bit like some of the strong real-life heroines of the film.

When we workshopped the game at the Bay Area Video Coalition Producer’s Institute, a more focused idea of audience and purpose emerged: we wanted to make a game that anyone could play but that would be tuned to speak meaningfully to tween girls, an especially underserved audience in gaming and superhero narratives.

With that in mind, and with the help of writer Phoebe Elefante, we crafted what’s become a really distinctive and different kind of superhero world, one where the protagonists are students, and the superpowers are more about the way you see the world, and how you find and recognize your own power to make change, than being a “chosen one” who happens to be bitten by a radioactive insect or struck by a magic lightning bolt.

How did you translate the themes and message of the documentary into a game? What was the most difficult part about doing this?

From my point of view as the game designer, the most difficult thing was jumping from nonfiction stories of real people’s lives to a fictional universe, and from the kind of media the audience watches to one where we’re asking the player to make a lot of choices. Because games often strive to convey an experience—or facilitate a conversation—that’s about the player and from her point of view, it’s tricky to use them to describe things that have already happened.

On the other hand, they’re fantastic for opening up imagination, possibility, and encouraging self-reflection through the act of making choices. There’s a big leap to make between those things, and that conceptual leap is probably the hardest part—but fortunately for our ideas, Wonder Women! the documentary is very much about the power of fictional universes (comic books!) to impact our own feeling of agency in life, in what we do. Once we identified that theme, and found a great question to ask via the game (“What kind of hero will you become?”) things really started to click into place.

You mentioned earlier that the Wonder City team made a conscious choice to avoid typical “girl game” clichés, such as cooking, shopping, makeup, and dating. How does the game  avoid these?
We just didn’t put any of that in. Girls can and do get themselves into all kinds of amazing, exciting situations that don’t involve cooking, shopping, makeup, or dating. Telling stories about other kinds of scenarios is even easier once superpowers get added into the mix, especially since uncontrolled bursts of quantum energy tend to interfere with precise makeup application or preparing hors d’oeuvres. Hmm, that might be interesting to explore in a future episode, though. ;)

In light of this year’s GDC and recent discussion, what are your thoughts
on #1Reason and women in the games industry? How do you think the industry can be more inclusive?
Awareness campaigns like #1Reason, and official discussions and panels like those that were happening at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference are more important than ever.

As a woman who’s been working in the game industry for over a decade, I can say without hesitation that the last year has been a watershed time where calls for change have burst into public discourse in a way that’s hopefully too loud to ignore. There’s been a lot of backlash, too, and I’m sure that there are plenty of powerful figures in the industry who have their fingers comfortably plugged in their ears, assuming all the heated outcry over representation, inclusion and treatment of women is just going to blow over.

I’m crossing my fingers that it doesn’t, and continuing to talk about this and encouraging others to do as well. The game industry has got to get more inclusive and less sexist if we’re going to reach our true potential as a creative form, one with limitless expressive possibilities and real social influence for good.

As for how the industry can be more inclusive, I think the mass-market retail section of the industry has got to listen to people inside its walls, like David Gaider, who are pointing out that they can be doing a lot more not to outright alienate women as an audience. The rest of the industry already is making more diverse types of games, and we’ve got to keep that going and encourage more women to get involved in making games, as students, professionals, artists and hobbyists.

Lastly, I think we have to get a whole generation of girls to start making games from a younger age, instead of just dropping out of gaming entirely when they get to be teenagers! I’m excited to see what the Riot grrl of games looks like in the near future.

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You can play Wonder City online here.

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Special Student Discount on G4C Festival Tickets: $100 for All Three Days

May 22, 2013 | by Games for Change | Comments: 1

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Q&A With MinecraftEdu Co-Creator, Joel Levin

May 21, 2013 | by Games for Change

Giving students the right tools to expand their knowledge and skills in the classroom is critical, and with MinecraftEdu, the immensely popular online game Minecraft has been added to teachers’ lesson plans at more than 1,300 schools across six continents.

MinecraftEdu Co-Creator Joel Levin (pictured right) will speak next month at the 10th Anniversary Games for Change Festival in a talk titled, “MinecraftEdu: Digging in a Virtual Sandbox for the Future of Education.” He’ll discuss how Minecraft, created by Swedish game studio Mojang, was remixed for the classroom and how it’s being used to teach science, art, language, digital citizenship, and more. Thanks to our partners at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, in addition to Joel’s talk, we have a very well-rounded selection of learning and games talks at this year’s Festival.

We emailed briefly with Joel to learn more about MinecraftEdu and get a sneak peek of his upcoming talk.

What are you most proud of so far with MinecraftEdu, and what are your future plans for it?
I’m very proud that we’ve managed to include so many useful hooks for educators without spoiling the “magic” of the original game. When kids are playing MinecraftEdu, it still feels like the game they love and can’t get enough of. But at the same time there are many integrated ways for educators to get their curricular content into the game world. We’ve really tried to respect the needs of teachers and students, from both academic and gameplay standpoints. As for the future, we’ve got many new tools and features planned that will explore these dynamics. You’ll have to wait for my G4C talk to get a peek at some of them. ;)

What’s been the most innovative lesson plan you’ve seen in MinecraftEdu?
I don’t know where to start! Almost every day I come across an original lesson or activity that I never would have dreamed of when starting this project. A history teacher had his students go through ancient Spartan military training. A science teacher had his students design experiments to rigorously prove that Minecraft gravity was unlike Earth’s. A drama teacher had her students record Shakespeare videos after designing the sets. There are also university researchers using the game to design environments for test subjects. Just do a search for the word “MinecraftEdu” on either Twitter or YouTube and you’ll find so many wildly different examples of how to use this game.


A class of students sets out for a lesson in Minecraft.

What are the biggest challenges with implementing MinecraftEdu in the classroom?
When I started in 2011 the challenges were purely technical, but I had full control of how I introduced the game since none of the kids had seen it before. These days it’s exactly the opposite. MinecraftEdu makes the game easy to get up and running in a school setting. However, so many of the kids have had their own experiences playing at home. It is often challenging to get the students to abandon preconceptions about the “right” way to play the game. You have to clearly set the expectations that playing Minecraft in school will be different from playing at home. It’s really similar to how playing basketball in phys-ed class will be different than playing a pickup game in the park.

What role should games play in the classroom, and to what degree should teachers use them in their lesson plans?
There’s no one right answer to this question. It depends greatly on an individual teacher’s style, the culture of the school, and the type of technology that’s available. But I am unequivocally convinced in the power of bringing games into the classroom. Games are highly relevant to youth culture and to ignore their power to engage is negligent. In the best examples I’ve seen, there is a seamless flow between games, face-to-face discussion, and traditional teaching tools. Kids are able to hop between these approaches easily.

I see many pundits and companies trying to nail down the formula for the right way to use games in the classroom. I think this is impractical at best, and hucksterism at worst. It’s like trying to find the right way to use books. There are many valid methods and types of experiences you can have. And frankly it’s all too new. What’s important is that schools get behind the idea that there is value in trying novel approaches in the classroom. They need to recognize that the characteristics of good gamers — resiliency, agency, lateral thinking — are the same characteristics of good learners.

Excited for the 10th Anniversary Games for Change Festival? Register here.

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Less Than One Month to Register for the G4C Festival!

May 21, 2013 | by Games for Change

Regular registration closes June 7, and tickets are going fast.

Register now — don’t get left out!

With less than one month left in registration, we’re back with more updates on the 10th Anniversary Games for Change Festival! Last year’s Festival sold out with more than 800 attendees — register now to get your ticket.

Our full program of speakers, workshops, panels, rants, and events is now online. We’re honored by the developers, organizations and individuals who are coming to share their game-changing knowledge with us. Here are a few highlights from our festival lineup:

Games and Learning
Thanks to our partners at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, we have some of the leading influencers in games and learning participating in this year’s event:

• A conversation with Stacey Childress, Deputy Director of Education, and leader of the K-12 next-generation learning portfolio at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

• James Paul Gee, the Cooney Center’s Michael Levine, Amplify’s Diana Rhoten, Education Week’s Kevin Bushweller, the Institute of Play’s Katie Salen, and E-Line Media’s Alan Gershenfeld.

• A first look at the line-up of educational games launching this fall from News Corp.’s independent subsidiary, Amplify, featuring indie developers Schell Games, Preloaded, High Line Games, Fay Games, Zachtronics, Strange Loop, and Bossa Studios.

• What’s the connection among neuroscience, learning, play, and games? We have one panel determined to find out.

• And you’re likely to hear some healthy doses of skepticism around games and the classroom during a series of rants under the theme “Gamifying Schools and Schoolifying Games.”

Games and Social Impact
• The U.S. Department of Defense, which has launched more than 40 games in the past 10 years, will forecast the future direction of games in the government.

• The team behind Half the Sky Movement: The Game, which has seen 680,000 players and counting since it launched on Facebook in March, will share insights on developing and publishing a large-scale social impact game, with speakers from Zynga.org, Frima Studio and Games for Change.

• Find out how New York City partnered with Kognito Interactive to support citizens’ mental health following Hurricane Sandy.

• Nonprofit Global Kids shares how mobile technologies can engage youth in public space exploration, local history, and civic participation.

• Developer James Vaughan will explore how mobile game Plague Inc., which caught the attention of the CDC earlier this year, educates millions of people and why it is effective at doing so.

• Learn how games researcher Jessica Hammer created a games-based youth education program in Ethiopia with Girl Effect, an NGO created by the Nike Foundation in collaboration with the NoVo Foundation.

Game Making
•Six thought leaders from the videogames industry will keynote the “10 Years of Games for Change” series: Leigh Alexander, Ian Bogost, Robin Hunicke, Brenda Romero, Jesse Schell, and Eric Zimmerman.

• The “Win Win: Models for Creating a Social Impact Game on a Budget” panel will outline four ways organizations can team up with indie game designers on game projects.

• Tribeca Hacks, Tiny Games, and How to Babycastles are among the hands-on workshops.

• Richard Hofmeier, winner of the Independent Games Festival grand prize for his retail simulator Cart Life, and Jenny Kuglin of Inkthirsty will speak on how the essential appeal of games can exploit their victims’ trust (and other cheap psychological tricks).

What are you most excited about from this year’s Festival? Leave your answers in the comments or tweet them to us using #G4C13.

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And the 2013 Games for Change Award Nominees Are …

May 13, 2013 | by Games for Change | Comments: 7

The 2013 Games for Change Award nominees represent an extremely unique mix of games—from a game with no graphics at all to another that incorporates biofeedback from the player—on platforms from mobile to Facebook.

Whether crowd-funded via Kickstarter or IndieGoGo or supported by government grants (from Vienna, Austria or the U.S. Department of Education), finalists reflect the increasing diversity of forms, audiences, and subject matter embraced by independent developers making games for change.

Our panel of judges nominated eight games across three categories: Most Innovative, Most Significant Impact, and Best Gameplay.

The winning games will be announced on June 18 at the 10th Anniversary Games for Change Festival, and one will be crowned Game of the Year, as the game that best represents all three categories. You can register for the Games for Change Festival here.

Have questions for the developers of these nominated games? Leave them in the comments, so we can ask them in an upcoming series of interviews with the creators of these games for change.

Most Innovative Nominees


A screenshot from Nevermind, which was nominated for the Most Innovative award.

These games best exemplify the use of creativity and technical experimentation in a manner that may pave new ways for games for change.

Blindside
Developer: Epicycle / Platform: Mac, PC, iOS
An immersive 3D audio adventure set in a world you’ll never see. Inspired by one of the creator’s personal story of being temporarily blinded in a high-school chemistry accident. This Kickstarter success story reached 200% of its funding goal.

Nevermind
Developer: Team Nevermind / Platform: PC
A biofeedback-enhanced psychological horror video game that challenges players to go outside the comforts of reality. Nevermind was developed as a MFA thesis at the University of Southern California and with support from IndieGoGo crowd funding participants.

Jewish Time Jump – New York
Developer: ConverJent / Platform: iOS
In this geolocational augmented reality game, players travel back in time to the early 1900s in Greenwich Village to uncover a story in Jewish and American history lost to time. It was funded by The Covenant Foundation.

Most Significant Impact Nominees


A screenshot from the Republia Times, which was nominated for the Most Significant Impact and Best Gameplay awards.

The games in this category best exemplify impact for a specific social issue with proven actions and outcomes.

Data Dealer
Developer: Cuteacute Media OG / Platform: Online browser
A game about collecting, collating, and selling personal data. It received funding from several Viennese and Austrian government agencies supporting arts and culture.

Eskom Energy Planner
Developer: Formula D Interactive / Platform: Online browser
From Cape Town, South African developer Formula D Interactive comes a game that allows the player to take custody of a virtual city’s power plan and to seek a balance between the most efficient technologies currently available and the most environmentally friendly ones.

The Republia Times (also nominated for Best Gameplay)
Developer: Lucas Pope / Platform: Web
As the editor-in-chief at The Republia Times, you must use your influence to print positive articles that paint Republia in a good light.

Best Gameplay Nominees

These games have shown highly compelling and engaging gameplay that aligns with and reinforces social issue goals. The winning game is one that is also polished in design, functionality, and thematic execution.

Reach for the Sun
Developer: Filament Games / Platform: Web
Behind all those leaves, roots, and petals is an intelligent bio-machine of starch, nutrients, and water. Help a young seedling grow and reproduce before winter approaches. From previous Games for Change Award winning-studio Filament Games and funded by the US Department of Education.

Quandary
Developer: Learning Games Network / Platform: Mac, PC, Web
Players shape the future of a new society while learning how to recognize ethical issues and deal with challenging situations in their own lives. It is the latest game from the Learning Games Network, a spin-off of The Education Arcade at MIT and the Games+Learning+Society Center at the University of Wisconsin.

The Republia Times (also nominated for Most Significant Impact)


We thank our talented panel of judges, which featured leaders of the gaming community, philanthropic sector, nonprofits and education, for their lending their time and thoughtful critiques in selecting the award nominees.

Nominating Panel Members:
• Cindy Au, Head of Community, Kickstarter
• Chris Bell, Game Designer, Giant Sparrow
• Courtney Bickert, Director of Global Partnerships, United Nations Foundation
• James Bower, Chief Visionary Officer, Numedeon, Inc.
• Yuri Cárdenas, Senior Producer, BitTorrent
• Sande Chen, Writer and Game Designer, Independent
• Stephen Chovanec, PBS Digital
• Justin Cinicolo, Vice President, Zynga
• Kate Edwards, Executive Director, International Game Developers Association
• Jason Eppink, Associate Curator of Digital Media, Museum of Moving Image
• Nick Fortugno, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Playmatics
• Leah Gilliam, Project Director at Hive NYC Learning Network, Mozilla
• Ben Johnson, Game Designer, Babycastles
• Jiyoung Lee, Co-Director of Entertainment Technology Center – Silicon Valley, Carnegie Mellon University
• Nathan Maton, Community Designer and Product Manager of OpenIDEO, IDEO
• Dylan McKenzie, Program Coordinator, NYU Game Center
• Chris Melissinos, Founder, PastPixels
• Konstantin Mitgutsch, Research for Learning and Games, MIT Game Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Giancarlo Mori, Executive Vice President of Product Development, Atari
• Lauren Pabst, Program Officer of Media, Culture and Special Initiatives, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
• Matt Parker, Independent Game Designer, Lumalus Inc.
• Max Sebela, Games Evangelist, Tumblr
• Diane Tucker, Director of Serious Games Initiative, Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars
• Adnaan Wasey, Director, POV Digital, POV / American Documentary Inc.
• George Weiner, Founder and CEO, WholeWhale

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Six Gaming Thought Leaders to Keynote the 10th Anniversary G4C Festival

May 8, 2013 | by Games for Change | Comments: 1

We are very happy to share with you the stellar line-up of keynote speakers for our 10th Anniversary Games for Change Festival (June 17-19). Six thought leaders, whose voices and work continue to shape the gaming industry, will reflect on the history and future of games for social change and learning through daily keynotes.

In the 10 Years of Games for Change series, Leigh Alexander, Ian Bogost, Robin Hunicke, Brenda Romero, Jesse Schell and Eric Zimmerman will give an authentic look at the challenges faced by this ever-growing medium and the opportunity for games to have positive impact on society.

We’re looking forward to insightful and inclusive viewpoints these talented speakers will bring to this year’s festival. For more information on speakers and to register, visit the Festival website.

In addition to these keynotes, other confirmed speakers include: Tracy Fullerton (Game Innovation Lab and University of Southern California), James Paul Gee (Arizona State University), Alan Gershenfeld (E-Line Media), Susan Gold (Global Game Jam), Richard Hofmeier (InkThirsty, creator of Cart Life), Alex Jansen (Pop Sandbox), Michael Levine (Joan Ganz Cooney Center), Diana Rhoten (Amplify), Phil Stuart (Preloaded) and James Vaughan (Ndemic Creations). See all participating speakers here.

Come and join us in June!

Keynote bios:

+ Leigh Alexander is a writer and longtime editor-at-large for game industry site, Gamasutra, where she contributes editorial, trend analysis and interviews with developers. She also writes for Edge, Polygon, Kotaku, Boing Boing and Vice’s Creator Project. She used to be NYLON Guys’ games editor, and in the past she’s contributed to Slate, Wired, Paste, Rock Paper Shotgun, and more.

+ Dr. Ian Bogost is an award-winning designer and media philosopher whose research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium. He is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and founding partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, consumer debt, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu, and tort reform.

+ Robin Hunicke, co-founder of Funomena, is a game designer, producer, and an evangelist for diversity of thought and participation in game design and game culture. She co-organizes the annual Experimental Gameplay Workshop, has chaired the IndieCade Festival, and lectures extensively on how developers can create novel, experimental designs by focusing on the feeling. She was the executive producer of the award-winning PSN title, Journey, and has worked on The Sims2, MySims, the Boom Blox series.

+ Brenda Romero is an award-winning game designer, artist, writer, and creative director who entered the videogame industry in 1981 at the age of 15. She is the longest continuously serving woman in the videogame industry, working at Atari, Sir-tech Software, Electronic Arts, and numerous companies in the social and mobile space. She is presently the Game Designer in Residence at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the co-founder and chief operating officer of Loot Drop, a social and mobile game company.

+ Jesse Schell is the CEO of Schell Games and a faculty member at the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center, as well as the former creative director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio. He is the author of “The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.” He has continued to help design and develop interactive theme park attractions as well as widely recognized mass market MMOs.

+ Eric Zimmerman, a founding faculty member of the NYU Game Center, is a game designer and academic who has been working in the game industry for nearly 20 years. He was the co-founder and chief design officer of Gamelab, which spun off two successful companies, including Gamestar Mechanic. Gamelab also created the Institute of Play, a nonprofit that looks at the intersection of games and learning that has launched two schools in New York City and Chicago based on games and play as the model for learning.

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The School of Visual Arts in NYC Offering Social Impact Game Design Workshop

May 8, 2013 | by Games for Change | Comments: 1

Want to learn more about game design for social good? Then get ready to work as hard as you play in this brief but intense workshop.

DSI faculty members Matt Parker, renowned game designer, and Asi Burak, co-president of Games for Change, will provide an overview of digital and nondigital games that help children and adults around the world become more thoughtful, responsible and committed citizens through play. In addition, participants will design and present their own game for social impact.

The faculty will lead participants through a high-level analysis, utilizing a set of guidelines, called the Eight-Step Methodology. Created and promoted by Games for Change, the eight steps work to flesh out original ideas into an informed and vetted strategy.

To sign up, visit: http://dsi.sva.edu/news-and-events/game-design-workshop/

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G4C Festival Seeks Volunteer and Registration Coordinator

May 2, 2013 | by Games for Change | Comments: 1

We are seeking a Volunteer & Registration Coordinator for the 10th Anniversary Games for Change Festival. None of our events would be possible without volunteers and supporters who are dedicated to building the community of games for social impact.

This unique position of Volunteer & Registration Coordinator at our NYC office for the Games for Change Festival is open immediately to all candidates who meet the proper requirements. Candidates must live in the New York tri-state area and be able to work in the G4C’s NYC office. Please see the description below and follow the appropriate instructions to apply!

VOLUNTEER & REGISTRATION COORDINATOR
Duration: Immediate – June 28, 2013
Stipend: $1,000 total

Responsibilities:

• Recruiting, screening, interviewing and training volunteers
• Overseeing the Festival registration process (creation of badges, on-site distribution of badges and registration materials, trouble-shooting any registration problems on site)
• Identify needs and opportunities for volunteer assistance with Games for Change staff
• Understand volunteers’ skills and availabilities to schedule them in appropriate and strong volunteer roles
• Communicate regularly with volunteers through check-in phone calls, emails and personal appreciations for their efforts.
• Maintain database of volunteer data
• Supervising volunteers and ensuring proper execution of volunteers’ roles on-site

Qualifications and Experience:

• Festival and/or event experience
• Comfort in being a positive team leader whose is comfortable in motivating and managing others (younger and older than yourself)
• Experience in recruiting, training, managing and supporting groups of people
• Volunteering and/or community service experience
• Desire to share Games for Change’s mission
• Strong language and communication skills (written and oral)
• Ability to give presentations to large groups
• Demonstrates ability to solve problems

To Apply:

Please email a cover letter and resume to Ai Ling Loo, Program Coordinator, at jobs@gamesforchange.org.

No calls, please.

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Announcing the Games for Change Festival’s Initial Line-Up

April 30, 2013 | by Games for Change

We’re celebrating our 10th anniversary at the New World Stages in New York City, and thanks to our partners contributing to this year’s line-up, we plan to do so in style. With the launch of our new festival website, we’ve started to unveil new content and programs. Check back for more updates!

10 Years of Games for Change: Keynote Series

Reflecting on the history and future of games for social change, thought leaders from the games industry will present daily mini-keynotes (30 minutes each). Confirmed so far are award-winning game designers Brenda Romero and Jesse Schell, and editor and journalist Leigh Alexander.

Keep an eye on the Program and Speakers part of the website for additional talks and panels in the following weeks.

Guest Curators

Babycastles: In addition to curating a Games for Change Hall of Fame (showcasing their take on the best games for social impact of the last decade), they will invite participants to create their own game arcades on-site using stuffed animals, lo-fi tools, and technology.

Hide&Seek: Coming off a successful Kickstarter for Tiny Games, a smartphone app that puts hundreds of real-world games in your pocket, the studio is creating a special installation of “Tiny Games for Change.” They’ll also give a talk on the design principles behind the studio’s commitment to real-world play and hold a workshop for participants to make their own Tiny Games for social impact in real time.

Global Game Jam: Earlier this year, the Global Game Jam introduced a new diversifier called “Big Picture” to challenge participants to make games with a positive social impact in just 48 hours. Some of the best of the 300 games resulting from that challenge will be displayed at the festival.

More Events, Additional Partners

Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center will host two panels featuring acclaimed leaders at the forefront of games, learning and innovation, including Dr. Michael Levine, Dr. James Paul Gee, Katie Salen, Alan Gershenfeld, and Dr. Diana Rhoten. The center will also present a selection of award-winning, youth-created games from the upcoming National STEM Video Game Challenge.

“Half the Sky Movement: The Game” Case Study: Games for Change, Zynga.org, Frima Studio, and funders and partners of the project will host an elaborate case study around this large-scale Facebook game for social change. Experts on game design, marketing and production will openly discuss the initial outcomes, best practices and lessons learned, including areas for improvement.

Tribeca Film Institute: This special Tribeca Hacks presentation will cater to filmmakers and other creative content makers in a hands-on game design workshop led by game designer Nicholas Fortugno.

Sex Etc. Games for Change Design Competition

For the first time, the festival’s program will feature a public design competition, which will award a cash prize of up to $35,000 to one team with the most innovative proposal to create a safe sex awareness game for the teen website, SexEtc.org. The deadline to submit ideas is May 17th. Three finalists will present their pitches on stage during the festival in front of attendees, potential funders, and a juried panel. For more info, visit: http://bit.ly/g4cguidelines.

Marketplace

The Marketplace debuts this year to facilitate business-to-business activity. Stop by and meet the companies—publishers, developers and service providers—working at the forefront of games for change and learning. If you’re interested in being part of the Marketplace, send your information here: http://bitly.com/G4C13Marketplace.

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We’ll keep you updated as we continue to add new experiences to the festival. Feel free to contact us at festival –at– gamesforchange –dot– org or 212-242-4922 with any questions.

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