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Why Robin Makes Batman Better Last night, an expo was held at the 2008 Games For Change event in New York City, to showcase the six finalists in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition. Students from around the world were challenged to build games around the theme of environmental sustainability, using Microsoft’s XNA community tools
The winner will be chosen at an upcoming Finals event in Paris next month.
“This is just our small part we’re playing,” Microsoft XNA general manager Chris Satchell told us. “It’s really a broader challenge to the industry.”
Microsoft can provide tools and a platform to support the development of socially-conscious games and to help them reach an audience where they’re already playing, Satchell said. “But no magic happens without the creators… it’s the stars that really produce.”
You can see a compilation video of the six “star” finalists above, and hit the jump to see video of the games, along with more info about the concepts and the teams behind them.
At the Games For Change 2008 festival in New York, the key topic was creating games as agents for social change – and included in events today was a panel on alternate reality games (ARGs), defined as collaborative, primarily user-motivated events that make the distribution of information into an entertainment experience.
You may remember World Without Oil, which invited people to visit a website to share fictional stories that imagined their lives in the event of a severe oil shortage. Player ideas were incorporated as part of the ongoing narrative on the site, and players could add photos or mail letters to the game operators. It’s considered groundbreaking, because it was one of the first ARGs that attempted to address a real world issue.
So how much does it cost to make a game like that? Sounds easy, right?
“Imagine a world where we have no ability to influence the people that are going to lead and shape thought for tomorrow,” said Microsoft’s Chris Satchell, general manager of XNA.
“We have social causes we care about, but we don’t have the means to connect with people who can do something about them. We’re not there, but its a world that’s possible to see unless actvitiesi like we’re doing here today really gain some momentum.”
Satchell was at the 2008 annual Games For Change festival, discussing the ways Microsoft hopes its XNA development platform will help provide creative activists and educators the tools and opportunities to connect with the young, energetic audience passionate about new media and world issues.
“People will base their lives around gaming experiences; gaming experiences will permeate their lives,” he said, stressing just how important it was for the culture to recognise games as agents of genuine social impact.
So what is Microsoft doing?
In mid-1980s Nicaragua, a woman stood beside a burnt out bus in a tiny, remote town. Game designer Jim Gasperini was in the region to visit his brother, a journalist covering Contra issues during the Reagan administration.
The bus, the woman told Gasperini, had been provided by the Nicaraguan government, and she had relied on it as her only means of visiting her sister. The Contras – anti-government guerillas funded by the U.S. – had destroyed the bus. The woman, passionate about American democracy, told Gasperini that if he could just tell everyone back in the States about what had happened to her bus, Americans would vote to help, the Contras would cease their attacks, and she could travel to her sister’s again.
Touched by her plight and by her faith, Gasperini wondered what he could do to disseminate information about the Contra situation. In the end, he decided to do what he did best: Make a game.
