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7th Annual Games for Change Festival May 24-27, 2010
Posted by Mark Smith on 04-26-10U.S. Chief Technology Officer
Aneesh Chopra, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor,
“Law and order: SVU” EXECUTIVE producer neal baer, M.D. Army Brig. Gen. Loree K. Sutton, M.D. AND DIGITAL PIONEER ALAN KAY
HEADLINE 7th annual Games for Change™ Festival
NEW YORK CITY, MAY 24 – 27, 2010
Festival expands to four days and includes day-long programs presented by the Games for Learning Institute and a Youth Game Design Workshop supported through the AMD Foundation’s AMD Changing the Game initiative
http://www.gamesforchange.org/fest2010
New York, NY (April 26, 2010) – Games for Change, the leading global advocate for making and supporting digital games in the public interest, announced today Aneesh Chopra, the first U.S. Chief Technology Officer, as Keynote for the 7th Annual Games for Change Festival taking place in New York City May 24 – 27 at Parsons The New School of Design. Organizers also announced the complete line-up of confirmed speakers, including former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, “Law and Order: SVU” executive producer Neal Baer, Army Brig. Gen. Loree K. Sutton, Director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE) and digital pioneer Alan Kay.
The Games for Change Festival is the only festival dedicated to the growing movement of Digital Games for Social Change; convening leaders from government, philanthropy, academia and the game industry to raise the sector of impact-focused games.
“With the seventh annual Games for Change Festival we are proud to present an inspiring line up of speakers from the White House, the Supreme Court, the Defense Centers of Excellence and the top echelons of the entertainment industry all of whom have recognized the power of digital games to foster meaningful learning, health and social impact,” says Alan Gershenfeld, Chairman of Games for Change. “This diverse mix of speakers coupled with an extensive program of panels, workshops and hands-on demos makes this year’s Festival a must attend for anyone interested in the growing field of social impact games.”
The 2010 Festival will be expanded from three to four days, to incorporate an additional focus on the educational impact of games along with a series of exciting new initiatives. The Festival will open with its popular and newly expanded, 101.5 Workshop, and debuts a day-long workshop entitled “The Power of Design: Youth Making Social Issue Games” created to help middle and high school teachers, non-profit leaders, and others develop social issue game design programs for their school curriculums or after-school programs. The new workshop on youth game design programs is supported by the AMD Foundation and will be held on May 24, 2010, at Parsons The New School For Design. The workshop is part of AMD’s signature education initiative, AMD Changing the Game, designed to promote social issue game development as a tool to inspire teens to learn, improve their science, technology, education and math (STEM) skills, and become more engaged with global social issues.
May 27, the fourth, and final day of the Festival, will be presented through a new collaboration with the Games for Learning Institute based at New York University. The multi-institutional G4LI studies the educational use of digital games, and investigates their socio-cultural, cognitive, and emotional impact. It develops design patterns for effective educational games that industry partners can draw on to assure high quality when designing their own games for learning. Its current focus is on games that teach science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to middle-school students. “Games for Learning is only 18 months old, but reflects the efforts of many professionals already working across a broad spectrum of inquiry for many years in computer science, educational technology and psychology and game design,” according to Ken Perlin, Director of Games for Learning. “On behalf of our G4LI partners from NYU and our eight partner universities, it is a honor for the Games for Learning Institute to help extend the mission of Games for Change to include the voices of our colleagues and friends in the community of learning games by hosting the first ever Games for Learning Research and Design Innovation Day at the Games for Change Festival. The program will be held at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences on Thursday, May 27, 9 a.m.- 6 p.m. with a Games Fest to follow at 251 Mercer Street [at Mercer and West 4th Streets], Room 109 [enter on Gould Plaza at West 4th and Greene Streets].
The Annual Games for Change Festival brings together the world’s leading foundations, NGOs, game-makers, academics, and journalists to explore how best to harness the powerful medium of computer and video games to help address the most critical issues of our day, from poverty, climate change, global conflicts, to human rights.
The festival includes four days of panels, keynotes and brainstorming sessions, as well as funders’ meetings, press briefings, and the always popular Expo and reception where attendees can have the direct experience of playing pioneering social impact games.
Featured Speakers
Prior to his appointment by President Obama in April 2009 as the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra served as Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, leading the Commonwealth’s strategy to effectively leverage technology in government reform, promoting Virginia’s innovation agenda, and fostering technology-related economic development. Previously, he worked as Managing Director with the Advisory Board Company, leading the firm’s Financial Leadership Council and the Working Council for Health Plan Executives.
Since her retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has founded Ourcourts.org, a game-based civic education resource for middle and high school students and teachers. “As the first generation digital natives, today’s youth have demonstrated the potential of digital media for civic education, political organizing,
and civic decision-making,” Justice O’Connor has said. “Ourcourts.org seeks to capitalize on this potential to reinvigorate civic learning and civic participation.”
Neal Baer is Executive Producer of NBC’s “Law and Order: SVU” and a medical expert. During his tenure, the series has won the Shine Award, the Prism Award and the Media Access Award, and has grown in both critical and popular stature. The series regularly appears among the top ten television dramas in national ratings. Prior to his work on SVU, Baer was Executive Producer of the mega-hit NBC series “ER”. A member of the show’s original staff and a writer and producer on the series for seven seasons, he was nominated for five Emmys as a producer and two as a writer. “Telling stories,” Dr. Baer has said, ‘whether on television, in movies, novels or in games is one of the most powerful tools we have for promoting social change.”
Army Brig. Gen. Loree K. Sutton, M.D. is Director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE). Sutton is the highest ranking psychiatrist in the U.S. Army, and has served as the director of DCoE since November 2007. She also serves as special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. DCoE is sponsoring a revolutionary initiative that addresses the timeless experiences of combat. The Theater of War will present performances of Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes for military audiences nationwide at military sites, suicide prevention conferences, service academies, war colleges, and medical schools. ‘Listening to the stories of Ajax and Philoctetes from 2500 years ago, one cannot escape the realization that the challenges of reintegration are as old as war itself,” says Sutton.
Dr. Alan Kay is best known for the idea of personal computing and the intimate laptop computer, and the invention of the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface and modern object-oriented programming. These were catalysed by his deep interest in education and children, which continues to be an inspiration to him. Kay, one of the founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center known widely as XEROX PARC led one of several groups that together developed modern workstations and the forerunners of the Macintosh: including Smalltalk, the overlapping window interface, the EtherNet, Laserprinting, and network “client-servers”. Kay has more than lived up to the phrase he coined: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Additional confirmed Festival speakers include: Clay Shirky, Internet expert and author of Here Comes Everybody; Nick Bilton, Specialist at the The New York Times R&D Lab & author of the forthcoming book, I Live In The Future And Here’s How It Works; Katie Salen, Executive Director of NYC’s innovative “game school” Quest To Learn; Dr. James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University; Micah Sifry, co-founder TechPresident.com and Personal Democracy Forum; Michael Levine, Executive Director of The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and internet humorist Ze Frank. A complete list of speakers can be found on the Games for Change Festival website.
The 2010 Games for Change Festival is supported by the AMD Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Parsons New School for Design, and in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. The Games for Learning Day is sponsored by Microsoft, Motorola and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
The Festival is open to the public. Passes run from the student rate of $100 - $600. For a complete line-up of speakers or to purchase a pass: http://www.gamesforchange.org/fest2010
About Games for Change (G4C)
Founded in 2004, Games for Change is a non-profit which seeks to harness the extraordinary power of video games to address the most pressing issues of our day, including poverty, education, human rights, global conflict and climate change. G4C acts as a voice for the transformative power of games, bringing together organizations and individuals from the nonprofit sector, government, journalism, academia, industry and the arts, to grow the sector and provide a platform for the exchange of ideas and resources. Through this work, Games for Change promotes new kinds of games that engage contemporary social issues in meaningful ways to foster a more just, equitable and tolerant society. www.gamesforchange.org.
About The Games for Learning Institute (G4LI)
The G4LI is a joint research endeavor of Microsoft Research and a consortium of universities. The partners include: Columbia University, the City University of New York (CUNY), Dartmouth College, Parsons, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, the Rochester Institute of Technology, Chile’s Pontifical Catholic University, and Teachers College as well as NYU. The Institute’s aim is to identify which qualities of computer games engage students and develop relevant, personalized teaching strategies that can be applied to the learning process. http://g4li.org