Our annual festival dates are locked:
June 20 – 22, 2011. The Pre-Festival Summit will take place on the 20th while the core days of the Festival will take place on Tuesday, June 21st and Wednesday, June 22nd. Keep up with us on the blog, Twitter and the Google Group for updates, including some new surprise announcements before the end of the year. A hint at some of what’s in store… think “play!” and think partnerships. In the coming weeks we’ll also make announcements about how you can submit a panel or talk for consideration. There will be a number of new ways to take part in this year’s festival. And if you’ve never been, please check out some activities from years past
here.
Games for Change Projects and Initiatives
Half the Sky
We’re moving into the new year with
Half the Sky, the transmedia project based on the best-selling non-fiction book by Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. We are happy to announce that through a request for proposal (RFP) process,
Schell Games was chosen to work on the pre-production of the social networking game. Their studio has created multi-player experiences across various platforms for world-class clients such as Disney and Universal. We look forward to Schell Games bringing their vast expertise and creativity from the commercial space to promote social change and galvanize the social movement around empowering women and girls, the focus of
Half the Sky.
Tribeca All Access
Speaking of transmedia, we’re also thrilled to be involved with Tribeca All Access (TAA), a program that helps diverse filmmakers find funding for their projects during the Tribeca Film Festival. For the first time, we are offering the “Games for Change Fellowship for TAA Alumni” that will enable us to mentor a filmmaker with a transmedia project who is new to the world of games and social impact. For more information, you can find our blog post about the announcement
here.
The World Bank Learning Institute
We recently formed a new relationship with the World Bank Learning Institute. We are helping them with their strategy around game development for learning and training purposes. The pilot project will include several games aimed at policy makers in developing countries (such as mayors or government officials). This is all part of the Bank's existing knowledge sharing programs. Please stay tuned as the Institute intends to distribute public RFPs to game developers. You can read more about the relationship
here.
USAID
Our work also continues with USAID, the government agency providing US economic and humanitarian assistance worldwide for more than 40 years. We are working with them to plan and create a portfolio of computer and video games to empower youth in the developing world. The focus is on the transition of youth into adulthood and the workplace. Together we’re leveraging existing efforts for creating a community of practice that can sustain this multi-year initiative. The first pilot will take place in one of the countries in which USAID operates. Leading on execution of the project for USAID will be
NetHope, a unique collaboration of 32 of the world's leading international humanitarian organizations working together to solve common problems in the developing world. This project is still in its early stages, but part of our role will be to assist USAID in inviting game developers and producers to take part in it. We will make sure to keep you up to date.
Our new partnerships don’t stop there. We also want to take a moment to speak about the new Games for Change
2010 - 2011 Advisory Board. They are an amazing new group from the worlds of academia, game development and design, film, social impact, and technology. To see a full list of our advisory board members and to view their biographies, click
here.
On the blog...
Recently we have done a series of interviews with social impact game makers. The goal is to expose our community to these creators and share their personal stories. We feel that by doing so, readers will gain a better awareness of their motivations and see what lessons they learned creating these types of games. Here are some of our latest interviews:
‘People Power’ interview with Steve York
The Cat and the Coup creators interview
Radwan Kasmiya of Afkar Media
Fate of the World interview with Klaude Thomas
Community Updates
In the last newsletter we mentioned some new community tools we were introducing. One pleasant surprise has been our Google Group. At first, we weren’t sure how our large community would respond to using this new tool, but now it seems that it is not only a real-time resource but it’s also turning into an archive of valuable conversations. If you’re not on the Google Group yet, we encourage you to check it out, join and become a part of the conversation. You can find our group
here.
Another tool we’re proud to offer is the
Games for Change Meetup Everywhere website. Over 100 people in 11 countries signed up to create Meetups all around the idea of “games for change.” We’ve seen Meetups in Austria, China, India, Hungary, the USA and Canada. To help everyone get more out of this tool, we are working on a Meetup Toolkit. This friendly manual will provide advice on how to organize successful Meetups and will contain other ready-made tools like a sign up sheet template and a check list for organizers to keep handy on the day of their event. We’ll let you know when it’s available!
You can find our Meetup Everywhere page
here and if you're in the
New York City area, the first Games for Change Meetup Everywhere gathering is happening on
December 7th. You can find full details
here.
