The Serious Games Initiative / Digital Games for Social Change

But this conference is more about political games than edu-gaming. And I think there's a lot of potential in this area. Last year I spoke with a woman in Australia who's working on a game about homeless teens: you play a girl living on the streets of Melbourne, who has to deal with drug addiction, find a warm blanket, and evade her stepfather, who wants to bring her back to a broken home. At the GDC this year, they had a panel on "Could you make a game that wins the Nobel Peace Prize?" Cliffy B's entry was a game where you'd have to play the father of a family in a war-torn country, with no weapons or resources, and you'd basically just have to survive and keep your family fed and sane while everything blew up around you. A game like that, where you're taking advantage of the game's immersiveness and the natural sympathy for the protagonist, could be really compelling.

I'm Games Editor for Paste Magazine, and I review games for The Onion AV Club. (I'm also at Pitchfork, ha ha.)

Darfur is Dying sounds like the title of a pretty sweet FPS. I expect it is quite the opposite though. :'(

Awesome. It's interesting though - the first Mercenaries game takes place in a nuclear North Korea, and it came out right around when they announced they had the bomb. The upcoming sequel is set in Venezuela!

Any RPG!

ha ha. do you have to fight with wil wheaton for games to review?

Don't think I haven't thought about it!

Actually, minus the snark, that's sorta what we're trying with Paste - we only have a couple pages an issue, but we're trying to take a brainier stance on games, as well as covering indie and off-beat titles like Samorost 2, Perplex City, and Darwinia. I don't know if the Paste audience digs it at all, but I'm having fun with it - and I think the writers are some of the best in the magazine.

ha ha. do you have to fight with wil wheaton for games to review?

Luckily he's on the classic games beat, so he doesn't trounce me too badly.

Therapeutic Gaming
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004521.html

As the San Francisco Chronicle puts it, the gaming industry is stereotypically perceived as "a gawky, geeky, hormonal juvenile delinquent who has an unhealthy fascination and mercenary interest in violence, combat, criminality, guns, porn, trolls, mutants, explosions and splatter." No doubt. But as we've demonstrated here time and again, gaming environments can be a staging ground for conveying humanitarian ideals, combatting corporate corruption, and learning about political conflict and peacemaking. They can even be an interactive approach to health and healing.

The image here comes from a game developed and designed by Ari Hollander as a tool to help phychotherapists treat patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder resulting from having witnessed or survived terrorist attacks.

Anecdotal evidence, [Skip] Rizzo and Hollander said, suggests that the therapy is helpful for some patients. New programs are introducing tell-tale aromas -- cordite, burning rubber, body odors -- to add to the sensation...Game developers, meanwhile, are preparing for other therapeutic possibilities [such as] games to address the effects of Alzheimer's disease -- potentially a $100 million market.

http://www.avclub.com/content/games/peacemaker

a review of Peacemaker, a puzzle game of sorts where the point is to work out a two-state solution in Palestine. You can even play it in Arabic, Hebrew, or English.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUtnas5ScSE