Games are “growing up”. Like documentary film before them, they are now transitioning from an entertainment-only medium into a vehicle able to engage serious and social-issue content. Game technologies provide an extraordinary opportunity for learning, civic engagement and social change around some of the most pressing issues of our day: poverty, climate change, racial inequities, global conflicts. Games allow players an environment to explore complex issues and their interrelated variables in a way that one-way media such as film and television cannot. “Situated learning” where players learn by interacting with the content has been shown to foster a deeper relationship to the material and a “safe” place to practice new behaviors.
Games for Change (G4C) aims to bring about concrete positive social change in the real world through supporting the emerging field of digital games. These new games not only involve the user in dedicated and sustained engagement in the issues facing them, but they aim to move the users to take their new knowledge one step further: taking action in the real world.
Topics range from human rights to economics, public policy to public health, poverty to environment and global conflict to news and politics.