Games For Change Holds 5th Annual Festival 13
Eleanor writes "Games for Change, the non-profit organization that promotes games which foster social awareness and/or activism, will host their fifth annual festival of the same name on June 2-4 in New York City. The festival, which will be hosted by Parsons The New School, features opening keynote speakers Henry Jenkins (MIT) and James Gee (Arizona State University), and the closing keynote is the Honorable Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who is working on a project on the court system in conjunction with Dr. Gee."
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Gaming as a whole is like a toddler right now, with more failures than successes and not fully sure what can be accomplished. We may find that games are awful places to examine relationships, or we might find that tragedy can be more poignant in games than in any other media. We don't know yet because games just aren't to that point. Festivals like this, where they celebrate games that attempt to be meaningful, help us to understand the limits and learn what works and what doesn't.
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Of course they are -- in fact, it's unavoidable. Anything anybody does causes at least some change, and games are no exception to that.
This has two differences: 1) that you've written the game with some specific change(s) in mind, and 2) that the changes you had in mind fit the organizers' idea of social consciousness.
Even if, for example, GTA IV was written with the specific idea of changing people's attitudes, it probably wouldn't qualify for this show. My own experience has been that shows like this are largely self-contradictory: they claim it's about socially conscious games -- but they nearly automatically disqualify anything that's really fun as not being sufficiently socially conscious...
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