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Games for Change (G4C) provides support, visibility and shared resources to organizations and individuals using digital games for social change. This is the primary community of practice for those interested in making digital games about the most pressing issues of our day, from poverty to race and the environment. We are the social change/social issues branch of the Serious Games Initiative.

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How to/Not to Develop an Activist Game in 4 weeks

Posted by Hsing Wei on 03-05-08

Conor O’Kane wrote a thoughtful postmortem on developing Harpooned, an activist game raising awareness about whaling in Australia.

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He discusses how his goals (to reach the widest possible audience and draw attention to an obsure issue) influenced his choices in:
* game engine (small download capable of running on older computers),
* gameplay (short shoot em up) and
* timing (released at the peak of whaling season). 
Aside from nuts and bolts, there is interesting reflection on the challenges of employing techniques that can be misintrepreted (irony) and the benefits of leveraging the online development community for feedback and testing.  (Full article at Gamasutra)


In a similar vein, Henry Jenkins wrote several debriefs a few months ago about the development process for game projects associated with MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program.  Most of the projects focus on games and education, however his reflections around the range of different models for what a game might look like (mods, ARGs, role-playing, etc), how they might be produced, and the value of meta-gaming apply to all issue areas.  Aside from the introduction entry, iCue (corporate partnership) and Backflow (iterative development) are worth checking out.