Just got news that our ongoing project In The Balance will be part of SXSW 2010 Interactive Festival. It's great news, as the festival is so incredibly competitive, with just tons of amazing interactive + music + cinema ideas and folks marking this venue. Take Action Game's Ashley York will represent the project as part of the "Interactive Documentaries: a Multidimensional Narrative" Interactive Panel, produced by Victoria Ha of Stitch Media Inc.
President Obama unveiled today "Educate to Innovate" - a major new education campaign designed to improve science and technology education in the U.S. - and a signature feature of the initiative is the Digital Media and Learning Competition supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in collaboration with the University of California, Duke University and the virtual network HASTAC.
Also, in collaboration with E Line Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, Games for Change is part of this major public-private partnership to launch a series of national game competitions to spur and promote new games for STEM learning. The President's announcement highlighted a STEM competition involving a joint MacAthur Foundation and Sony initiative featuring Little Big Planet as the development platform.
President Obama's remarks here, from this morning.
New York Times article here.
Games For Change press release here.
From the IT University Copenhagen and the Nordic Game Jam comes the Dark Room Sex Game... the download worked perfectly for me with the Wiimotes. It's pretty effective, i think, and funny... and the in-game graphics are superb!
This Onion video is quite hilarious... via the blog of a colleague in Prof. Jenkins' New Media Literacies seminar at Annenberg.
"RePlay: Finding Zoe" - an online casual game we developed in partnership with Canadian advocacy organization METRAC (Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children) has been selected a finalist for an Adobe 2009 MAX Award, in the Social Responsibility category. The game addresses gender stereotyping and violence against women and girls, and seeks to bring awareness to this pervasive problem.
We are in great company and it is an honor indeed. If you can spare a moment (it really is easy and fast, truly!) to cast your vote, Take Action Games would be grateful!
Simply review the Adobe Finalists site here and click on "Vote" - that's all!
Once again, I post this NPR story by Laura Sydell for which I was interviewed a little late and for personal archiving reasons. Thanks Erin for posting about this... and btw, is commenting possible on your blog - I tried but without success.
As I haven't yet gotten around to blogging more concretely about Games for Change 2009 nor about Documentary Games... I'm thankful Ian Bogost has posted his notes from the panel.
Please excuse tardiness and redundancy of this entry, but decided to post it for personal archiving reasons, as I realize now that I never did.
NPR interview "Online Game Peers into Life in Darfur Refugee Camp," by Michele Norris
a very interesting read i just came across with many relevant thoughts to today's design discipline... a little disheartening (while remaining inspirational) considering these are J. Baldwin's words from 1991 and the situation/s he described might not be better today:
"When the environment protests by exhibiting intolerable degradation, the principal malefactors customarily dodge responsibility. Their captive designers abdicate. The corporate system is set up (designed!) to shield designers and their masters from financial ruin if protest grows strong. Corporate clout influences politics. Things are arranged so somebody else--most often taxpayers and the poor-- will foot the bill
Because the narrow-visioned thinking of specialists is well rewarded, particularly in academia, pernicious effects are invisible to those involved. The need for interdisciplinary effort is usually considered as a theoretical matter for future discussion, impractical, or as a turf-invasion to be repelled by bureaucratic maneuver. This situation is a veritable petri dish for culturing dishonesty and ineptitude.
The third force [he lists the first as "competition," the second as "specialization"] affecting an individuals effectiveness is the intuitively sensible urge to work for security. Security can he defined as ensuring the future will be to your personal advantage--another sort of "win." Our society condones the accompanying implication of selfishness. "Good old New England individualism"--long considered a traditional American value--may be translated as "I've got mine, and you can go to hell." This is not systemic thinking, It is not a useful mindset for a designer who needs to realize that true security is not to he had for anyone until all people live well, in a just and ecologically sustainable society."
full essay here
The Games For Change 2009 Festival was great and enlightening this year, as it has been for its past 5 years. Full program here. A nice write-up about our "Documentary Games" panel here, from the Center for Social Media's blog. Also, check back with the G4C site shortly for videos of great panels and keynotes (NYTimes Nicholas Kristof and EA's Lucy Bradshaw).