Games With Social Impact Catalogued

Thanks to Terranova for pointing out the Social Impact Games site, whose goal is "to catalog the growing number of video and computer games whose primary purpose is something other than to entertain." Among the weird and wonderful entries are Straight Shooter, "A first person shooter game in which marketers hunt for clients in cities, airports and hotels around the world [and shoot 'idea' projectiles at them]", Sim Health, a little known Maxis-developed project that "...was designed to inform the debate in the summer of 1994 over what kind of health care system the United States should have", and God Speed 3D, which "puts you on a wild roller coaster ride... [as] you listen to [biblical] lesson questions."

Comments

Change Maker

[BrookHarty]

Heres one that teaches, and is kinda fun. Change Maker

Thought it would be easy, but when you get into currency with 2 cent coins, made you think for a moment.

Feedback

[RobotWisdom]

I've only gotten three pages to load, but here's some initial feedback:

• hardcoded tablewidths of 780 are a pain in the butt if your normal windowsize is 640
• 'primary' purpose is ill-defined
• most wargames ought to qualify
• I'd like to see a single timeline for all entries, with short descriptions and links
• my overlapping timeline is here [cache]

This could be useful

[Qzukk]

Next time someone comes along and claims that games aren't speech, then we can toss this portfolio of educational/informative/etc. titles into their lap and ask again.

hope im not flamin but...

[UltimaL337Star]

these don't sound like social impact games, more like clevar metaphor's made into games...