Games for Change Festival

The ‘active participation’ that video games demand is exactly why Games for Change is convinced they can foster education, awareness, and social good.

W

e know what you’re thinking: What does a video game have to do with changing the world? How do 10 million teenagers parked in front of their Xbox,

killing zombie hordes, make things better for anyone? In some ways, you’ve answered your own question — and

identified the potential impact of the Games for Change Festival. “The mission is pretty simple,” said Asi Burak, co- president of the New York City–based Games for Changes organization. “How do you take the medium of video games, that we strongly believe is becoming one of the most domi- nant if not the dominant medium of this century — how do you take it and utilize it for social good?” Launched in 2004, the festival brings together “a mix of

different people that are coming from very, very different places,” Burak said. Professionals from government agencies, nonprofits, and corporations — “usually from social-respon- sibility programs” — join video-game makers for a three-day program that celebrates and explores the power of video games to raise awareness of important social issues, provide sophisticated education, and even change behavior. “Unlike the media that came before or that are competing with video games,” Burak said, video games have “attributes that really, really map very well to social change, to being active in the world, to learning, and it’s very different than traditional media that we know.” At the 2012 Games for Change Festival, which was held

at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on June 18–20, more than 800 attendees had a variety of programs to choose from, including a daylong track for the Federal Games Working Group, which, according to the fes- tival’s website, is “designed to network game developers and researchers interested in working with U.S. Federal Agencies such as National Air and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the National Endow- ment for the Arts (NEA), and the White House Office of

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