Suzanne Seggerman, President and Co-Founder, Games for Change.

Author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The The New York Times will discuss his new book and television project, Half The Sky, which seeks to bring global awareness to the tens of millions of women and girls whose lives are devastated as a result of sex trafficking, maternal mortality and gender-based violence. Kristof will also announce an accompanying social networking game, which he hopes will help convert this awareness into a global movement to turn oppression into opportunity for women and girls throughout the developing world.

Fall 2008 saw the release of a major new study - "Teens, Video Games and Civics." Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and co-authored by Joseph Kahne of Mills College, the study found that, "virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement." We are also witnessing across the board an extraordinary surge of civic participation in teens and college students through new media campaigns such as mTV's "Choose Or Lose." And the Joan Ganz Cooney Center will be releasing a new study in May 2009 on games and their application in education and civic engagement. It is becoming increasingly clear that games are a powerful new tool in engaging young people on the most pressing issues they carry with them into their future. Panelists: Joseph Kahne, Dean of the School of Education at Mills College, Ian Rowe, Deputy Director at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Michael Levine, Executive Director Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Omar Wasow, Ph.D. candidate in African American studies and political science, Harvard

As more and more games are being used and created specifically for learning as well as civic participation, the need for clear assessment strategies for measuring the effectiveness of the various approaches is increasingly imperative. From well-funded and established game projects like Quest Atlantis, to the extensive and comprehensive studies at University Wisconsin at Madison’s Academic Co-Lab, to the more experimental initiatives like the NYC “Game School” Quest To Learn, games and learning scholars share their views on how best to begin a long-term and sustainable framework to assess games for learning. While they will reflect on experiences in their own designs, the panel is charged to report out in a manner that will allow us to benefit from some of their experience and insight as we design assessment for civic engagement and social change in our own games. James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University, Katie Salen, Executive Director, Institute of Play; Associate Professor, Design and Technology Department, Parsons The New School for Design, Constance Steinkuehler, Assistant Professor Assistant Professor Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kurt Squire, Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

AA fundamental concern Games for Change seeks to address is “issue literacy”— the understanding of issues and their systemic causes. This session presents three programs teaching youth about games as tools for exploring and addressing societal concerns: Boys and Girls Clubs of America game design curriculum, Colleen Macklin, Director of PETLab and Associate Professor, CDT Parsons, The New School for Design; John Sharp, Professor Interactive Design & Game Development, SCAD-Atlanta; Barry Joseph, Director, Online Leadership Program, Global Kids; Mary Flanagan and James Bachhuber, Vexata, an issue literacy board game, Tiltfactor Lab.

10:45am - Break

11:15am - Documentary Games
As game theory and the practice of making games become recognized as valued pedagogical and cultural processes across a broad spectrum of disciplines, we see forthcoming a movement specific to a new genre — documentary gaming — which will position game systems within a framework that questions the practice, ethics, and identity of games. Can documentary best practices help us negotiate the socio-political and cultural significance of a game? Do the same ethical concerns and the validity of the “truth claim” affect games the way they have historically influenced the efficacy of documentary and journalistic media? How may designers, filmmakers and activists collaborate to advance and diversity the space? Panelists: Steve Anderson, Assistant Professor, Director, Media Arts & Practice Ph.D. Program, University of Southern California; Tracy Fullerton, Professor, USC, Interactive Media; Emily Verellen, Senior Program Officer, Fledgling Fund; Judith Helfand, Filmmaker, Co-founder, Working Films; moderated by Susana Ruiz, Doctoral student, Co-founder, Take Action Games.

Mary Flanagan, Tiltfactor Lab, will use her specially-designed Grow-A-Game cards to lead the audience in an exploration and hands-on game-building exercise in creating games about meaningful social issues. Lunch on site! Maximum 150 participants.

Leading game designer and author Eric Zimmerman and Karen Sideman, Games for Change will take the audience through the process of how a game is proposed, conceived, designed, play-tested, evaluated, and assessed. A freewheeling and performative session inspired by the television show Iron Chef, Iron G4C Designer will engage participants from all the G4C sectors including funders, game designers, educators and NGOs on stage in the full game design process. The final product: two playable in-session games for change pitted against each other with a final pitch session to pick—and play—the best one.

New York Times game critic and technology journalist Seth Scheisel moderates this industry-focused panel, with former industry game execs (and current G4C board members) Alan Gershenfeld (Activision) and Sharon Knight (Electronic Arts) in a conversation with Lucy Bradshaw, Executive Producer, Spore, Electronic Arts and Larry Goldberg, former Chief Corporate Office and EVP, Activision Studios on the challenges and opportunities of engaging the mainstream industry in creating multi-million unit sellers with social impact agendas. Is the mainstream industry ready for a game for change? Is the game for change community ready to make a financially viable video game? How do we bridge the dual (and sometimes dueling!) goals of money and meaning?

The G4C community is made up of almost exactly equal parts NGO, educator, industry, and media, and is best known for the cross-sector collaborations that form the core of these emergent game models. This pre-Expo Night activity challenges festival-goers to reach across their disciplines to foster an environment of play and meaning as the beginning of the evenings’s event unfolds around them.

Expo Night is an evening reception where festival-goers can play games, meet each other, and enjoy food and drink in a lively and informal atmosphere. Visitors will also be invited to play the newest games from our community, including games on debt, HIV AIDS, and a number of important domestic and global issues. This year, the Knight Foundation will be sponsoring the 2009 Knight News Game Award, where we will feature and present awards to the best news games from the past several years.

Henry Jenkins is the Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. James Paul Gee is is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University.

New challenges are arising from the philanthropic sector as foundations explore how to fund the emerging use of games in the public interest. What are their current initiatives, goals and constraints? What can the community do to assist their work? Hear from the organizations examining and supporting the work of this community. Panelists: Joaquín Alvarado, Founding Director, Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University, Arlene de Strulle, Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings, Laura Callanan, Social Sector Office of McKinsey & Co, Philanthropy Practice, Jessica Goldfin, Journalism Program Associate at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and a representative from the MacArthur foundation.

How do you combine the expertise of public and private organizations to create a fun, action-based, multiplayer game for HIV prevention messaging without being an obvious "AIDS game"—all in less than a year? As part of a Public Private Partnership (PPP), The Partnership for an HIV-Free Generation and Warner Bros. in collaboration with the U.S. Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), produced an action-based videogame (Pamoja Mtaani) for implementation in three youth centers in Nairobi, Kenya." Panelists: Debra Baker, Senior Vice President, Operations for Warner Bros; Grace Osewe, Project Manager and lead, Pamoja Mtaani Videogame at the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator; Delia Lang, Research Assistant Professor, Emory University Rollins School of Public Health; Dr. Linda Wright DeAguero, Chief of program evaluation, Centers for Disease Control and prevention/CDC; Moderator Spencer Stephens, Vice President and General Manager, Warner Bros.

This panel addresses the challenges of expressing values through games and the difficulties of maintaining ethical game design. Topics include the ethics of games promotion, representation in games, and the game development process, as well as the potential of games to inspire ethical reflection and reasoning. Panelists include: John Nordlinger, Senior Research Manager, Microsoft; Jordana Drell, Director, Preschool Games, Nickelodeon; Sam Gilbert, Research Assistant at project zero, Harvard and Doris Rusch, Post Doctoral Researcher at MIT Comparative Media Studies, Singapore-MIT. Moderated by Karen Schrier, Senior Producer/Doctoral Student, Scholastic/Columbia University.

This panel discusses games as promoters of a “new designer mindset," that is more critical, participatory, and in tune with the needs and challenges of the 21st century, than the mindset promoted by our expert-driven society. Ivan Games, Sean Duncan, Moses Wolfenstein and John Martin from the UW-Madison Games, Learning and Society group, present complementary research approaches to the study of games, play, and design thinking, hoping to start a broader conversation on this important issue. Moderated by Hsing Wei, Games for Change.

Frank Lantz, Area/Code and Karen Sideman, Games for Change will reprise their open discussion with the community. Always our most popular session!

A conversation sponsored by The Knight Foundation featuring Ian Bogost, Research & Design Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology, Founding Partner, Persuasive Games; and Clive Thompson, Contributor, The New York Times, Wired.

A closing keynote with Lucy Bradshaw, Executive Producer, Spore, Electronic Arts.