Games For Change
Latest
Games For Change opens free registrations for its virtual 2020 festival
For the first time in its 17-year history, the Games For Change Festival will be free to attend. As in past years, they'll also be an awards ceremony honoring those in the game industry who have had a significant social impact. Games For Change also announced four additional keynote speakers.
Papers, Please, Gone Home, and more named finalists at the 11th Annual Games for Change Awards
The 11th Annual Games for Change Festival kicks off in New York on April 22, shining a spotlight on video games and developers pushing the medium not just as quality entertainment or educational tools but as venues for social justice. On Tuesday the organization announced its finalists for the Games for Change awards, honoring eight games for their gameplay, innovation, and their impact in highlighting specific issues from underage drinking to the dangers faced by migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. At least two nominees were amongst Joystiq's favorite games of 2013.
Designing edutainment, the Valve way: make a good game first
"People don't sit around at Valve and say 'We're educating.' They are educating the player. But it's just good game design," Valve Software's director of education programs Leslie Redd told me in an interview yesterday afternoon. She and her coworker, Valve's Yasser Malaika, were on stage earlier in the day during New York City's annual Games for Change Festival presenting Valve's latest and boldest education initiative: Steam for Schools.The program offers educators a modified version of Steam that puts control in the hands of teachers – and offers students a chance to snag a free, unmodified version of Portal 2 and its puzzle maker. Teachers are able to add "lessons" as they see fit, created in Portal 2's puzzle maker – several of which are already available.It's a first for Valve, and really for any game developer operating today. Thankfully for those of us who love Valve for its video games, not much (if anything) is changing in Valve's approach to game design. "Having a fun game is so connected to learning and mastery and agency and social dynamics. You can't really design a good game without really considering all those things and putting in the effort to understand how your customers respond to those things. And it feels like that process has a lot of value, more than the product," Malaika said.
'Steam for Schools' is a free version of Steam for students, facilitates Portal 2-based lessons
"Steam for Schools" is Valve's next push into edutainment. This summer, educators can apply for beta inclusion in the program, which includes a "limited version of Steam" featuring Portal 2, the game's level editor, and its workshop for hosting and organizing user-created levels. This new version of Steam will be free for educators (in and out of beta), and will give educators administrator access – meaning that kids cannot share levels."We have a limited version of Steam, which is called 'Steam for Schools.' And what we're doing is asking for teachers, after school programs, organizations – anywhere where there's a student relationship, which includes homeschooling – for them to submit a form to be part of it. It's still in beta," Valve's Leslie Redd told attendees of today's Games for Change festival in New York City. The initiative is a continuation of what Valve head Gabe Newell spoke about during his keynote at last year's Games for Change event, where he professed 'no difference' between education and entertainment approaches.The Washington-based company intends on opening up that level of access in the future, but Redd said that "children need that walled garden." In the future, Valve intends to allow more openness.Valve isn't receiving any outside funding or grants for the program. "Valve is a commercially successful company," Redd explained with a smile. Of course, facilitating a massive education program for free is pretty great public relations. Other publishers aren't involved just yet, but Redd said there've been some initial talks.For more information, Valve's "Teach with Portals" website is now open and will expand in the coming months as the beta extends across the summer (hey, that starts today!).
Watch Gabe Newell's excellent Games for Change keynote in full right here
Sure, you read our thorough coverage of Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell's Games for Change keynote last month, but we know how you like moving pictures. We do too! And that's why we're doubly happy to finally present the entire, highly entertaining speech, just above.
Newell sees no distinction 'between games and educational games'
The majority of Valve president and co-founder Gabe Newell's keynote address yesterday at the Games for Change Festival was dedicated to his perception of games as educational tools. And that was fitting for the event, which is dedicated primarily to the educational and socially beneficial elements of gaming, and fitting for Valve Software, a company known most recently for releasing a game steeped in science. Newell explained: "The interesting thing about Portal 2 is it doesn't sort of fit the traditional simplistic model of what a game is. It's not a collection of weapons. It's not a collection of monsters. It's really about science. It's about spatial reasoning, it's about learning physics, it's about problem solving. And often, during the course of the game, you're going to be solving problems with somebody else. The social model inside of it is collaborative and not competitive." After rolling a short clip of the game for audience members, Newell went on to profess, "There seems to be this distinction between games that are educational, and games that are going to be commercially successful. I'm not really sure I buy into that." Citing sales of Portal 2 as proof, Newell pointed out that Valve has seen "$165 million dollars in gross revenue" from the game since April 18. "We can do this. We can make educational, commercially successful games, which are gonna help us both on the game side and on the educational side." He reaffirmed this to me in an interview after the speech, saying, "I just don't believe in this distinction between games and educational games. A lot of times [the label] 'educational games' is a way of being an excuse for bad game design or poor production values."
Portal 2 Authoring Tools for schools: Newell explains
Sure, we already think Portal 2 is a wonderful educational tool, but Valve wants to convince everyone else of that fact. And not by evangelizing the title to college-aged people the world over, but instead by turning the game into a more direct learning experience, with custom tools to match educational programs. "We just add another layer on top of the authoring tools to simplify the production of those spaces," Valve head Gabe Newell explained to us this afternoon. In so many words, the level creation tool for the PC version of Portal 2 gets another layer of interaction on top of the placement of, say, platforms or boxes. "If you give us a lesson plan, we can give you a tool that allows kids to build content to lock down those lessons," Newell detailed. "The number of times I solved problems about how fast will this be going at this time -- how about if it's on the moon?" In his words, "It's a lot easier to get people excited about it [education] if they're on the moon and they get to throw the rock at the piece of glass that breaks the glass that lets all the robots fly out." We can all agree on that, Mr. Newell. Without indicating when the education-focused version of Portal 2 will be released, Newell confirmed that his studio is currently building the application. "The layering on top of it of the framework for giving people a direct physical experience of physics is there, but you have to tell me exactly how you want to measure whether or not your students are successful or not." While we're certainly interested to see what Valve cooks up, we have to imagine that the students of the world are far more intrigued.
Valve interested in Wii U; 'It fits better into our scalability model,' says Newell
This morning, Valve head and co-founder Gabe Newell gave one of several keynotes at New York's Games for Change Festival, speaking to a variety of topics surrounding education and gaming. And while we'll have a full breakdown of that keynote in the coming hours, we thought you might like to know what Newell had to say about Nintendo's Wii U and his studio when we put the question to him. "Wii U seems to be a lot more powerful than the previous generation," he told Joystiq. "It sort of fits better into the scalability in terms of graphics performance and CPU performance, so I think it'll be a lot easier for us to fit it into our scalability model." Valve has yet to release any of its games on a Nintendo console, though Gabe told us, "We've always loved Nintendo." He also pointed out that Valve has been slowly transitioning from the PC to console counterparts, starting with Xbox 360 and more recently moving to the PlayStation 3 in a major way with Steam getting ported to Sony's console. And it looks like Nintendo may be next, as Newell restated, "Now it's a lot easier to look at Wii U and have it fit within that framework." As for us, we're most excited to see what Valve might do with the WiiPad.
Al Gore shares an incontestable truth: 'Games are the new normal'
"Games have clearly arrived as a mass medium," former Vice President Al Gore professed to a crowd of Games for Change conference attendees this afternoon. Gore gave the event's keynote address at New York University earlier today, where he looked especially sleepy from a redeye flight out of Tokyo. "This is a very large, extremely significant industry, with a radically diverse and growing audience of players on all kinds of platforms," he added, citing the ubiquity of gaming over the past few years as a result of efforts by major console manufacturers, smartphone makers, and (of course) Facebook. "Games are the new 'normal' for hundreds of millions of users every month." Gore went on to speak about his own admittedly short past with gaming, saying that the last game where he felt he "was best in the world, potentially" was Pong. He did, however, recently convert his book "Our Choice" into an eBook for iOS devices. He related this experience with the world of "serious games," where gaming is used to "illuminate issues that can seem intractable and overly complex." In so many words, it was an arduous process for him to convert the book -- just as it's difficult to convert complex concepts to the gaming medium. The secret sauce, he claimed, was in working with a group of "really good partners who know what they're doing." Identifying those partners, however, is where things get tricky. "How you insure that the integrity of the content is not in any way compromised, but rather enhanced," he pointed out, is another major issue. Without providing a roadmap for how to navigate that issue, Gore put it on conference attendees to take up the task -- not to mention the hundreds of millions of gamers worldwide. Gaming is the new "normal," after all, so shouldn't gamers be involved?
GDC 2010 Microtalks: Big ideas, tiny speeches
The GDC 2010 Microtalks session was a frazzling experience in many ways. The format of the event essentially assures it. Ten lecturers -- all from different sectors of the game industry -- each spoke for five minutes and each were allowed to use 20 different slides. Naughty Dog's Richard Lemarchand set the stage for the speakers, announcing the theme of the talks as "come play with us." The goal of the microtalks, said Lemarchand, was to help game creators capture the "radicalizing exuberance" of games and give them the energy to "transform the world" through the power of play. The resulting cavalcade of images and ideas -- ranging from methods of play to behavioral economics -- is a bit difficult to distill. Thankfully, we were taking notes. There was too much at the event to condense here, but it was definitely a thought-provoking event. We've highlighted a few of the more interesting speeches after the break. %Gallery-88130%
Knight News awards to recognize serious games, zombies
We weren't sure what to expect when we rolled up to the first annual Knight News Game Awards, wearing our finest armor and eager to graciously accept our much-deserved award for sharpest swords. It turns out the ceremony, named for its sponsor -- the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation -- is designed instead to recognize a new genre of games, namely those that are "journalistic and enhance people's ability to make decisions in a democracy." Boy, were our faces red, not that you could tell beneath our newly-polished helmets. The awards presentation is set to kick off as part of the Games for Change Festival this week, which runs from May 27-29 in New York City. Event organizers today announced the finalists for the awards, which include a handful of socially-conscious games including Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City, Play the News and the controversial September 12th – A Toy World. Our pick: The Budget Maze, where players navigate a dungeon while quizzing zombies on city or state budget processes. Who better to consult on financial planning than the undead?
Former Supreme Court Justice designing educational game
In recent years, gaming has made great inroads with non-traditional demographics like women and senior citizens. There is one segment of the population, though, that has remained extremely hard for the game industry to crack: former Supreme Court justices.That looks like it might be changing, though, if Sandra Day O'Connor's recent speech to the Games for Change conference is any indication. The former associate justice for the country's highest court is using her retirement to help design an educational game called Our Courts with University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor James Paul Gee. The game, due out in September 2009, will let players "step into the shoes of a judge, a legislator, an executive" and "teach [players] how to think through and analyze problems, take action and voice opinions to their elected representatives," according to O'Connor.O'Connor sees the game as the first step to fixing the American public's deplorable knowledge of civic matters. "Only one-third of Americans can name the three branches of government, but two-thirds can name a judge on American Idol," she told the conference. Maybe if some of those branches of government passed a bill commenting on Sanjaya's hair they'd get more attention. We're just saying ...
Microsoft teams with Games for Change to help cool global warming
Got a great idea for a game on global warming? Microsoft and Games for Change (abbreviated G4C) are launching a competition this summer in more than 100 countries for students to develop a game "based on the theme of global warming."Details are scant at the moment, but we do know the students will be expected to use Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express, the free version of their development tools. Winners will have a chance for their projects to appear on Xbox Live Arcade, and the first-place team or individual will have an opportunity to intern at Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business.
NPR talks "Games for Change" conference
NPR's Marketplace introduced the segment saying, "They're often accused of wasting your time or promoting violence but a conference in New York City this week wants games to be known for something more." The ongoing Games For Change conference is part of the larger Serious Games initiative, but is focused specifically on using games to encourage social change. NPR profiled three of the games on display at the conference, including: Peace Maker - "a one-player game in which the player can choose to take the role of either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President. The player must react to in-game events, from diplomatic negotiations to military attacks, and interact with eight other political leaders and social groups in order to establish a stable resolution to the conflict before his or her term in office ends." A Force More Powerful - "simulates nonviolent struggles to win freedom and secure human rights against dictators, occupiers, colonizers, and corrupt regimes, as well as campaigns for political and human rights for minorities and women. The game models real-world experience, allowing players to devise strategies, apply tactics and see the results." Darfur is Dying - MTV's "narrative-based simulation where the user, from the perspective of a displaced Darfurian, negotiates forces that threaten the survival of his or her refugee camp. It offers a faint glimpse of what it's like for the more than 2.5 million who have been internally displaced by the crisis in Sudan. A far cry from the hysteria-prone coverage the mainstream media typically adheres to and great exposure for a group of gamers working to not only foster social change, but to evolve the educational potential for video games. Follow coverage of the conference by monitoring the 06-G4C del.icio.us tag.
