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Games For Change Holds 5th Annual Festival

Posted by timothy on from the offbeat-games dept.

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."

4 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. Er... by Malevolyn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not knocking this, I promise, just a discussion point: aren't games inadvertently changing things as it is?

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    1. Re:Er... by moderatorrater · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, but knowing what you're changing is important. Films can be good and important and overall very awesome because directors walk into the film knowing what works and what doesn't, and it took them 50 years to get to the point they're at now. It's even made dumb films better because even bad directors can use the lessons that have been learned.

      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.

    2. Re:Er... by Jerry+Coffin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not knocking this, I promise, just a discussion point: aren't games inadvertently changing things as it is?

      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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    3. Re:Er... by AstrumPreliator · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ... and it took them 50 years to get to the point they're at now. And what point is that? For the most part movies today are unoriginal, over use special effects, neglect making the movie interesting, and really aren't that good. That's not to say there aren't some really good ones which have come out recently; I just don't see this magical improvement in movies you're referring to. Perhaps you've not seen many classics?