2019 Games for Change Festival

As game and experience designers, we are often tapped to “make things fun”. While there is no secret recipe, there are key strategies and insights that can lead to excellent design. Based out of IDEO’s Play Lab, Jenny Gottstein works with clients in a wide range of industries to leverage play as a tool for innovation, resilience, engagement and creative problem-solving. She will be sharing case studies and tools for moving beyond points, badges and leaderboards, and turning even the most dry or overwhelming issues into an experience that is memorable, engaging and fun.

65% of American households have someone in them that plays games for three hours a week or more. The game industry is larger than film and music combined. Despite this, there are significant problems with hate and harassment in games, game culture and the game community. This talk will discuss efforts by the Anti-Defamation League to understand and address the problem of hate in games through a variety of interdisciplinary approaches.

Recognizing that millions of Americans love to play video games, the Ad Council partnered with Square Enix to create its first PSA made from gaming footage. The partnership used scenes from the highly anticipated Kingdom Hearts III game to promote bullying prevention. The Ad Council will share a case study from this partnership including tips for creating PSAs from your own games.

In 2018, the City of Portland, ME set out to create a game by, with and for new immigrants and refugees in the city. Over the course of four months, designers worked with the City’s Office of Economic Opportunity and its city-wide advisory council to identify needs, refine learning objectives and design a game to be played by English language learners to discover resources in the city and to provide input. This discussion focuses on the challenges of building new tech, socializing the idea of a game, and creating ownership to assure a project’s sustainability. 

In cities and neighborhoods, a new kind of game design is emerging. The digital and physical are coming together, from hybrid playgrounds to embedded screens at bus stops. Games were not the original goal. But as millions of youth learn to program Raspberry Pis ($50 each), and escape rooms can be created with DIY (Do-It-Yourself) kits, the movement is growing – and without headsets. In this provocation, you’ll hear how the future of mixed reality does NOT use consumer devices – but rather is embedded in public space and physical objects, strengthening neighborhoods from Mexico City to Los Angeles.

Companies are strip mining our cognition in their quest to hold our attention. But it’s not an infinite resource and those organizations don’t price the destruction of cognition into their cost of doing business. They have every incentive to continue the destruction. But we lose our ability to make rational decisions at work and as citizens, to take on the many complex extinction level challenges society now faces.

When the art and science of decision-making itself collapses might we face a Great Cognitive Depression?

We’ll explore playful ways to use games and AI to build cognition and cancel biases.

We know immersion creates empathy. But how can you get players to engage voluntarily with a sad game about child abuse? Elin Festøy, creative producer of the award-winning mobile game "My Child Lebensborn", talks about the importance of character development to reach out to younger players.

How can the fastest growing media platform in the world be harnessed to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals and the urgent global needs they represent? Is your game company about to change the world – literally? With input from over 50 games industry leaders, the 2019 United Nations Environment report “Playing for the Planet” summarizes recent developments to yield seven key recommendations on how the video games industry can achieve tangible, real-world impact for the issues and people who need it most. Discover how you can empower your game, your company and your players, and add your voice to a groundbreaking UN event. https://playing4theplanet.org

I love building technology that can cultivate a generation of creators. I founded Endless, an independent collection of companies and initiatives focused on unlocking the untapped potential in youth.

Endless’ initial focus was to make computing universally accessible for everyone. We started by building software to solve internet connectivity for kids in the developing world. Endless OS, our flagship product, is a fully functional operating system that works on any form of internet connection.
Today, Endless is taking this a step further to empower a generation of kids, in the US and elsewhere, to shape their technology rather than being shaped by it. Endless is doing this through three initiatives: Hack harnesses Endless OS to embed coding education into the heart of an operating system. The Third Terminal is a collection of coding-based games that focus on inspire delight. Finally, The Endless Mission is a sandbox-style Steam game that takes players on a journey to a world where nothing is as it seems and the power to reshape the game itself sits at the tips of their fingers. All of this, to shape your games and, through it, your world.

I discovered my passion for building organizations of consequence when I founded the China Care Foundation at the age of 16 to offer orphaned children a brighter future. China Care has since raised over $14 million to provide surgeries, foster placements and adoptions for thousands of special needs children, as well as spawning dozens of campus clubs. For this work, I've been honored as one of Oprah Winfrey’s “People Changing the Lives of Children Around the World”, as one of Teen People’s “20 Teens Who Will Change the World,” and the youngest recipient of the Fulbright Award. All of this was set in motion by living in China with a family at the age of 11. That year in China changed my life more than anything, setting me on the course that has landed me here today.

I am a graduate of Harvard College (‘06) and Stanford Business School (‘12).

Join us for a close examination of two landmark works from Ndemic Creations: Plague Inc and Rebel Inc, games that simulate complex processes (the spread of epidemics and insurgency in an invaded country) to evoke play, exploration and edification. Naomi Clark will play and discuss Ndemic's work, joined by James Vaughan of Ndemic for a discussion.

Sex is rarely discussed with depth in the mainstream gaming world. Analog games are uniquely positioned to explore this topic by leveraging embodied, participatory frameworks, and physicality. With a focus on queer sexualities, we will delve into how analog games can discuss sex effectively and safely. We will also touch on a new book of erotic art games co-created by Sharang Biswas and Lucian Kahn, with a grant from the Effing Foundation.

In the last few years, games and VR for change have encouraged support, sympathy, and action for a variety of migration and refugee issues. In this talk, I analyze and compare the virtual reality installation Carne y Arena (Iñárritu 2017) and the digital game The Migrant Trail (Gigantic Mechanic 2014), as part of the multimedia project The Undocumented (Williams 2013). I will show how both digital media examples use semi-fictionalized ethnographies to allow their users to thoroughly experience a fragment of Mexican and Central American refugees’ and migrant’s personal journeys and life stories.