2023 Games For Change Festival Shows How Video Games Can Be Used For Good

Are video games good for you or bad for you? Well, like most types of technology, it’s really in the way that you use them, to quote an Eric Clapton song. Certainly some types of video gaming are not positive influences. But over the course of 20 years, the annual Games for Change Festivals (G4C) have shown how video games can be used for positive change—potentially a whole lot of positive change.

Each year, this festival, held for the most part in Manhattan, New York City (more on this later), has offered a real virtual buffet of games, technology, and immersive experiences. This has included talks, discussion, demos, and hands-on (or in some cases heads-on, feet-on, or other body parts-on) experiences. They’ve ranged from video games to teach people important health and social change concepts and strategies to virtual reality games to help people better appreciate what it is like to have a given health conditions to artificial intelligence (AI) robots to provide assistance. All along, there’s been one commonality across all of these buffet entries: they each must in some way lead to positive change in society.

The festival has evolved significantly since its inception back in 2004. That’s not surprising since the gaming industry was still in its oh, baby, baby stages in 2004 and has really grown subsequently. Back then, The World of Warcraft was just getting going. Many people were still playing on GameCubes, Xboxes, and PlayStation 2s. And virtual reality was virtually not a reality yet.

Flash forward to the 2023 edition of G4C and you’ve got a much broader array of offerings including virtual reality and a special XR for Change Summit, covering augmented reality. This year’s G4C held in the third week of July also featured for the first time a Games & Strategic Development Goals (SDG) Summit at the United Nations and a Next Gen Fest for youth in addition to its usual programming.

But the past five years have seen particularly accelerated growth under the leadership of Susanna Pollack, who has served as President of G4C since 2015. The festival was already growing from year-to-year as an in-person event until 2020. But then something happened that year in 2020 that rhymes with “Oh-vid-19-and-emic.”The Covid-19 pandemic descended upon the world in early 2020, forcing many things including the G4C Festival to go virtual.

Take a wild guess as to what happened to stuff that was already growing online in a virtual when society were forced to go more virtual. If you answered, “Grow even more,” then you’re right. “During the pandemic, video games have become a social lifeline for many kids,” explained Pollack. “Over the two-year period. the narrative around games was changing. There was renewed appreciation for such games.” Pollack talked about how this change actually helped her realize the potential for G4C’s growth: “Our world for G4C opened even more. Over 123 countries participated in the virtual festivals with over 7000 attendees. That was a seven fold increase. We realized there was a real appetite for this and an opportunity to develop more of an international presence.” In other words, there was a lot of change for Games for Change.

Pollack spoke of “new opportunities presenting themselves. Foundations, companies, and funding agencies wanted to help people. New projects emerged. For example, we started a project with the Nobel Peace Center.”

This year’s G4C Festival was in person in NYC again along with a virtual component for people to join remotely too. And many attendees were game to see what would be featured. What was once a one-day meeting has become an event that extended practically the entire week. And the offerings were far from weak. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It offered a window (or perhaps a screen) into the wide range of ways that games can really help people and society.

For example, one of the panel discussions featured folks from Free Lives describing Terra Nil, an ecosystem reconstruction strategy video game that the company developed. In the game, players are supposed to transform barren wasteland into an thriving ecosystem in a manner that is sustainable and supports different animals and plants. This can help players better understand the current climate crisis and what needs to be done to address it.

Another example is MyopiaX, a smartphone application developed by Dopavision. The app when used in concert with a virtual reality headset allows people to play games that generate light patterns that may stimulate dopamine release in their retina. This app is undergoing a clinical trial to determine how well it may slow the worsening of nearsightedness, otherwise known as myopia, hence the name of the app.

Then there was one of the featured speakers, Paolo Pirjanian, the founder and CEO of Embodied Inc., which has a whole lot of Moxie. Moxie is an AI-powered robot that can offer company and conversation for kids who are five to 10 years of age and teach them kindness, friendship, empathy and respect. The AI and natural-language processing (NLP) aspects of Moxie allow the robot to interact like a real live being, answering and asking questions. As Pirjanian explained, “AI is a super exciting game-changer. Bigger than any other technological innovation that we have witnessed.” He added, “Every time there is new technology innovation, people can use it for beneficial or malicious purposes. We have to focus on how AI can nurture society to make it positive.”

There were also discussions about how to motivate and facilitate more of a corporate ethos to give back to the communities and more and more corporate social responsibility initiatives. Panels talked about how to foster more diversity, equity, and inclusion in the gaming industry such as having more diverse creators. Pollack mentioned one example of such as initiative called Girls Make Games.

All of this is still the tip of the gaming iceberg. Pollack sees many opportunities for much greater growth. This includes different new types of immersive media including augmented reality that can help you better understand others’ lived experiences. She pointed to existing products that can already help people better experience what it’s like to have something like schizophrenia or body dysmorphia and explained how future efforts can build further on these. There is room to develop new business models that are even more sustainable as well.

However, there are obstacles to surmount. “There are still some hold over misconceptions from beginning the pandemic,” Pollack explained. “These include concerns about addiction, misconceptions that games play can be isolating experience versus connecting people, and facilitating dialogue, collaboration and critical thinking.” She added, “A lot of people in this industry would love to support developing games for positive change at individual-level. But at a company level they may not be willing to commit resources—human or financial.” She continued by saying, “Sometimes it’s about finding the right champions as an individual and the right team to work with. This can take a while to navigate because there are a lot of good intentions but everyone’s busy.”

There’s certainly no lack of problems in society to address. And many of these problems are already beyond what humans unaided can solve. Therefore, why not employ technology in a way that can help? Casting technology in the form of games can make the solutions fun and more likely to be adopted. While there are bad actors who want to use technology to take advantage of other people, many, many people would rather see the world a better place. And they are game to help.