I'm in New York at Games for Change Festival 2007. I'm going to attempt to liveblog some of it here.

Keynote Conversation with Chris Melissinos and Alan Gershenfeld
Alan Gershenfeld, CEO of Netomat and former head of Activision
Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer, Sun Microsystems

Virtual Activism: Exploring Nonprofits in Second Life
Susan Tenby, Tech Soup
Evonne Heyning, Amoration
Jeska Dzwigalski, Linden Lab
Beth Kanter, moderator

Market Sector Impact
Alex Chisholm, ICE3, MIT, NBC
Eric Brown, ImpactGames
Stephen Friedman, mtvU
Heather Chaplin (moderator)

Serious Games & Games for Change: Then and Now
Ben Sawyer

(out of power for a while, recharging)

Where are all the good Games for Change?
Eric Zimmerman

Technorati Tags: g4c, games for change

Keynote Conversation with Chris Melissinos and Alan Gershenfeld

Alan started: the idea of games for change has both potential and challenges.

Potential: you know the size of the game business, but the opportunities are larger than you might think. The average age of gamers is 33. According to the ESA, 94% follow news and current events and 74% vote. You can reach multiple generations at home with games. Games are no longer isolated experiences, games are connected now. You can therefore connect games to social activism, seamlessly connected to the games.

There are amazing tools to make it easier and reduce the risk of making games. And through organizations making it clear that this is taking place makes this a growing concern.

Challenges: entertaining games are very hard to make. Activism in general is very very hard. So a social game is very very very very hard to do well. In the early 90s, every Hollywood studio invested hundreds of millions of dollars in games divisions and they all failed. The most successful games of all times were made natively for the medium. It's not just a matter of repurposing your content.

You have to play games, you need to understand the genres, you have to learn what games are to understand the tools at your disposal. Find developers who have made games in the genre you want on the platform you want. Do the research. It will exponentially reduce your risk. You don't necessarily need to know how to make the game, but you need people who do.

Alan then started a "keynote conversation" with Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer at Sun Microsystems.

Q: How did you become and what is CGO?
A: I've been at Sun for 13 years, and made my first game at 12. Selling games to a company that was "the dot in dot com" was not easy. I finally was able to sell this within the organization.

Q: What's available in terms of making games and what does Sun have to offer in that regard?
A: There are a lot more tools available today. Many of them are free. Sun is committed to community and open source (the largest contributor to open source in the world). Java is free for developers. We need to pull together a repository and set of lnks for he attendees at this conference. There are a lot of tools and a lot of those are pretty good. Use the tools that are right for you. But wading through what's out there is hard.

Q: Between Java and Flash, what are the pros and cons of each?
A: With Flash, you don't have to be a programmer to use them. But you can't get down and do performance coding. Flash is great for lighter work, but 3D and harder core types of games. There are no games on the PC today that couldn't be written in Java. Java also works cross platform. Every Blu-Ray player has a Java VM, for example.

[Alan adds: play the games you like, and talk to developers about them.]

We discovered that the first consumer branded Java product was an Activision game. People don't buy technology; they don't buy TiVo becuase it runs Linux, they buy TiVo because it pauses television.

[Alan: almost every phone has a camera on it, for example.]

Figuring out how we can use these technologies to better ourselves is the hard part. Sifting through everything out there is hard though.

Audience questions:

Q: What are your companies doing for Games for Change?
Chris: Sun is focused on community. Every one of the technology platform we have has an open source community. One of founders of Sun is passionate about is education... leveraging web technologies for education. Game and technology platforms to teach young developers is another example.
Alan: Open source in general is important. We see this in RFPs more and more.
Chris: We created a game server called Darkstar. And we'll be releasing that through GPL. There are a lot of people who want an enterprise class game server.
Alan: Parents also need to play games with kids.

Q: Those of us in NGOs and NPOs think about the last mile. What are you doing to make gaming something where we interact between the real and the virtual world?
A: We don't have a model to build on, and people are throwing a lot at the wall. Blogs and twitter are one example, machinima is another. ̆But creating a game is different from flickr or youtube. Modding is an area in which that might happen.
Chris: One of the titles I want to mention is a game called Steer Madness from the IGF in 2005. The player explored a city as a steer who had escaped the slaughterhouses freeing animals. They had a game that was entertaining enough that you would at least listen to what they wanted to say. Please don't make games just because you think it's the cool thing of the moment, make good games.

Virtual Activism: Virtual Activism: Exploring Nonprofits in Second Life

Susan Tenby, Tech Soup
Nonprofit Commons Project is a community of practice to explore Second Life, to make it easier for NPOs to get involved in it. She couldn't find any NPOs in Seocnd Life, so, she decided to help organize cmmuities in 2L. They now have meetings, a wiki, a shared blog, a management group, and a directory. The Nonprofit Commons includes 32 organizations and room for more.

Evonne Heyning
How do we visualize ideas in Second Life? In 2005, she worked on ManorMeta, a futuristic world learning lab, where kids could come. Then she transitioned to Second Life. Among the examples are Camp Darfur, which starts at a burning village and shows maps of the areas, the experience of trying to find a refugee camp, and then taking it back to the web with a comic book and machinima. AMOgame is a non-profit that tries to help turn people on to issues and get them engaged in them. In 2L, they created an island for this space, and then created a games like "hugcapture" and "lovebomb" and "stare" ... [not sure what these are exactly]. These people can collaborate and also have fun while they are doing it.

Jeska Dzwigalski
(Speaking from in-world) ... and unfortunately the sound feed was so choppy we couldn't hear any of it.

Heather led with questions:

Q: The power dynamic between the commercial and non-profit sector is changing. Now there are real business problems. Can you talk about that?
Alex: The issue of how companies work with NPOs to legitimize what they are doing is something that is growing in the conversations I've been having. But this idea of corporate citizenship is growing... as people become more networked, the idea that a company can control its messages is shifting. Transparency is a new goal. In terms of solivng business problems, there are benefits for companies to work on education, the environment, and human rights.

I'm working on a project with NBC News, and Ian Bogost has forged a relationship with the NY Times. The news division at NBC has asked us to look at that problem.

Q: Eric, tell us why you took PeaceMaker commercial.
Eric: Some of the challenges we face... there are sensitivities. We were trying to avoid bias and at the same time find funding. We wanted to show that people will spend where there values lie. We raised financing from investors who expect to see their money back. Other foundations have helped us, for example in doing some studies on the game. It's like a Shindler's List model: because you've made something of value, people will help you get it places you might not otherwise find it.

If you are going to look for publishing and distribution, there are people who won't touch you because of what you've done.

As for the for-profit model, we didn't think we would get rich, but we did think that contract work wasn't viable... we wanted to be financially stable and not have to rely on foundations and non-profit funding cycles. I can't really do the less expensive version to prove that I can do the more expensive version.

Q: Stephen, you're on the other side of the fence at Viacom. Tell us about what you're seeing from that perspective.
Stephen: I came from non-profits, so coming into MTV to create its pro-social department almost ten years ago was complicated. What I learned is that you've got to think of it in business terms... you can't tell people they have to do something because it's the right thing to do. From the top down, [MTV] cares about this, but my job is to "use our superpowers for good." If you do it with the goals of the company, you can have a great, visceral connection. Our audience knows best, so we try to partner with them, and listen to them. It was here at this conference three years ago that we announced here that we wanted to support a videogame on Darfur, partly to move beyond activists. Today we announced that we're going to translate the game and put it into the international channel, and 128 countries will be getting this game.

[response to audience question]
A: It's really our nonprofit partners who are going to handle the actions that people take after the gmae.

Audience question: any crossover with religious groups?
A: Darfur is not branbded MTVu, and we put no advertising on it, so it's a separate thing and it helps people see it differently

Eric: We don't have a marketing budget. Darfur is Dying gets the benefit of MTV's attention and support to push awareness. So finding ways to do that is really helpful. Starbucks did a green game on their homepage, so finding the right partner can really help.

Audience question: "cause marketing" is a popular idea these days. How do you feel about that label and the way corporations are using that thinking?
Eric: You need to make a good game that comes from something you care about. If enough people do it really poorly, people will stop paying attention.
Alex: The marketing word carries a lot of baggage. If you think about it from a more fundamental perspective fundamental to a company's business, then it makes more sense. For example, General Electric has a huge energy focus right now. Or for Intel and tech companies to embrace education in response to brain-drain in the U.S. I think in those cases the substance of the concerns informs the strategy.
Stephen: I think we would have been open to a lot of attack, if we had launched Darfur in a vacuum. We spent two years supporting students to go to Sudan, and contextualizing the issue in schools.

Q: Youv'e all talked about the idea that the game can't be the only thing you're doing. Say more about that.
Stephen: The [Darfur] game really gets under your skin... but if you don't have infrastructure to support that, it's really irrelevant. Young people are incredibly pragmatic, and if you don't give them resources they're going to move on to other things.
Alex: The engagement is the game, and the activation points are separate, in terms of what it is you want people to do. You set up where they can give money, where they can find answers, you provide teachers with a lesson plan, you think about where this thing sits in the consumer's ecosystem.

Q: How do you get a non-profit to talk to you?
Stephen: Every one of the TV channels have a pro-social campaign. We're all trying to figure out other methods of engagement.
Alex: I think what Stephen recommended in the community points of these large companies are a place to start. Usually there's a small team of people managing those efforts. Unlike a film studio, these people are desperate for ways to engage their audiences beyond core abilities.
Stephen: We've got money parked for mental health> Suicide is the #2 killer of college kids. We have a rich campaign around that idea and we understand the TV and the online but we don't know what kind of game to do. We have a budget but no ideas. We gave 5 $35k grants along with Cisco.

Audience question: Lifecycle issues. Is there a fatigue for an issue like Darfur?
Eric: We're not the contract studio, so we need to market on an ongoing basis. We have a reason to keep the game in front of people. There are some places that will and some that won't host our content, but we're having to figure out a market for this... how do we deal with people who don't know about us at all? Can we be somewhere by association?

Heather: Are movie stores or other stores willing to put games in their displays?
Eric: It was always a question with our investors, and we're trying to expand them further. I think there are progressive avenues where we can find some traction.
Alex: If you're part of a larger corproate initiative, and you're built into their banner-ad initiative, then that's a way that things can be tailored to people's uses, in the context of an ad model.
Eric: If there were people who had done this before, it's a lot easier. When more people have done it, the access will be easier.
Stephen: We never thought of Darfur as a campaign, and this game continues to get continual traction. But with sexual health, this is a way to revitalize an issue we've been working on for ten yars.

Audience question: As an independent game, how do you raise money?
Eric: We got some funding from local economic development, but we also got funding from an angel investor. We took the same route as any startup company. The biggest trick in this space is convincing an investor that it is actually going to happen. Some of our pitch had to be riding on the positive social nature of the game.

Serious Games & Games for Change: Then and Now
Games were already serious before Serious Games. Ben recalled his talk at G4C from two years ago, and then we were talking a lot about games. But maybe you don't need to make a game to accomplish your goals. Other perspectives include making everyday activities more game like (e.g., the new version of Office with the contextual interfaces).

The Serious Games Initiative has been dormant, although working on a federal budget game. Games for Health will have a west coast day, in Seattle around the Penny Arcade Expo. In the games for health field, like in this one, many people have never spent any time with gamers outside their own living rooms. They've never seen how game companies market, what people do around games, etc. And colocating this event will help accomplish this. The regular games for health conference will take place in late May 2008.

The initiative has also been working with the One Laptop Per Child program to support the development and distribution of games on that platform.

Change in Serious Games:

Stop thinking serious games are that which "I work on" -- that specific to them
Make better games
Reasses where games really are. There is less and less argument of games as an element of media capability to do lots and lots of tings. Instead, we are arguing more and more amongst ourselves.
Bad games only come from people who actually make a game. Make something!
Expand our views of games
Invest in infrastructure over content for a while
Democratize game development
Commercialize serious subject matter
Reassessment: most people don't play games
EA and Nintendo are happy if three million people bought their game. They don't care who it is, or what they bought.
Most people have to be made to play games
Gamers skip over text

Where are all the good Games for Change?
The title of my talk presumes another question: are there good games for change? Yes and no. Compared to a few years ago, there are a lot more games that are not just for entertainment. But the games we are seeing are not really fulfilling on the promise of what draws us to this field and this medium.

Today I want to talk about design, and what are the fundamental issues around the design of these sorts of games. What I am going to say is pretty basic in terms of game design but could be useful.

Gamelab does all kinds of games, mostly online games for broad audiences, not neessarily for change or education. I want to talk about game design. What are these games we're not fulfilling? What would these games be like? I took a random sampling of cultural products that set a really high bar in other media.

Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States, a revisionist social history of the United States
Art Speigelman's Maus, a pulitzer prize winning graphic novel
Jenny Hotlzer's Truisms, which appeared in plaques and electronic signage and t-shirts and other things

We should set a really high bar for games that would follow suit. Each one of these examples make pretty incredible use of their chosen medium. And this kind of expressive use of the medium leads to insight and cultural effect. We're no where near this level of cultural sophsitication when it comes to games, either in our thinking or in terms of the games we are making.

I'm going to talk about systems thinking, procedural representation, expressing "the message," and executing a great game.

Systems thinking: people are talking about gaming literacy, not just traditional literacy but gaming literacy, and systems thinking is a big part of that. Thinking about things in terms of how parts interrelate to a whole.

[Eric ran a short exercise to demonstrate systems thinking]

Say you are doing a historical game. It might be better off created as a system of, say, economies, or cause and effect. In this field, we deal wit a lot of very unusual subject matters for games. Translating them into a game context requires thinking about them in system terms.

Every game has a conflict, and we need to find the conflict in the game we might design around a topic.

Procedural representation: games have the ability to depict things. When we're talking about making a game with social content. Procedural representation is a game native mode. Games can signify through sound and visuals, but they also signify through their rules and interactivity, and that's where I think the power to use games for social issues lies.

[Eric ran a short exercise to demonstrate procedurality]

(I had to leave early to set up for the expo; I will try to get notes from others)

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