Gaming Change

Games for Change (G4C), an ongoing project of management think tank Serious Games Initiative, provides administrative, academic, and technical assistance to nonprofit groups working to use digital games as a tool for fostering social change or raising awareness of global issues.  G4C offers artists, game designers, academics, government officials, and humanitarian groups a forum for sharing resources and finding flexible, collaborative ways to address problems ranging from the depletion of natural resources to conflict and poverty.  Through professional networking, G4C hopes to foster transparency, community-involvement, and transparency.

G4C’s specific projects address a range of topics.  While offering support for games exploring nonviolence and development, the group also works on a meta-level to increase collaboration and dialogue in civil society.  Its Learning and Media Network–developed in conjunction with the MacArthur Foundation–builds connections between community groups and academic departments through the use of digital media, while Gamers for Net Neutrality advocates open access to the Internet a key for insuring transparency and the growth of open, pluralistic, participatory society.   

The idea of using games as engines for education and social change has a bit of a legacy.  The most dramatic example appeared in the early 1970s, when the New Games movement grew out of the environmental and community-building interests of the counterculture.  Although the organized movement had its ups and downs, proponents used the collaborative, imaginative style of game play in conflict resolution efforts around the world from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century.  Generations earlier, the experiential education model developed by John Dewey relied on play for personal and social exploration–an idea used by school reformers in the 1920s and during the New Deal of the 1930s.  Overall, these games have ranged from vigorous, physical exercises to beautiful yet abstract board games reminiscent of Hesse’s fictional Glass Bead Game.  The socially-oriented games promoted by Games for Change strike a balance between these extremes, presenting issues in a visceral (in some cases action-oriented) way while helping players understand complex relationships.