Why Games Matter

By: Derek Yu

On: November 7th, 2007

Changemakers is an initiative set up by Ashoka, an international network of “social entrepreneurs,” and one of the projects they’re working on is an online community that holds competitions to “surface the best social solutions, and then collaborates to refine, enrich, and implement those solutions.”

Recently, they held a competition called “”http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competition/healthgames">Why Games Matter: A Prescription for Improving Health and Health Care," which, unfortunately, is practically over (just got wind of it recently). But you can still check out the 14 finalists and 74 total entries. The winners will be announced tomorrow.

All competition finalists will win the opportunity to go to Baltimore, Maryland, in May 2008, to present their work at the Changemakers Change Summit held in conjunction with the RWJF-sponsored Games for Health Conference. Competition winners will receive a cash prize.

The finalists are pretty various, and include the previously covered Ayiti: The Cost of Life, and Persuasive Games’s Fatworld (depicted above in all its childboob glory). There’s also a series of mobile games to bring AIDS/HIV awareness to cellphone users in India. (As well as a massively multiplayer online Bollywood-themed dancing game WTF?)

I’m always interested in hearing about the application of games to areas other than entertainment! These kinds of initiatives warm my jaded game-maker’s heart. It still seems like there’s a lot of growing to do, however, before we start seeing some truly compelling “social games.”

Posted in Community, Competitions, Developers, Social Impact

Exoduster

When is Fatworld coming out, anyway? I heard about it a while ago, and the site says early Fall, but it’s bordering on late Fall.
Skyleak

I would like to pass a law that parents that get their kids fat to the point of unhealthy degree should be held accountable of child abuse.
Alex Waterston

Can you imagine massively multiplayer dance dance revolution?
It’d be monstrously awesome.
Patrick

Derek, you may be interested to know I designed the core interface for a Bollywood-themed dancing MMO, but not that one…
http://www.g4g.it FireSword

Shake, shake shake…

Shake shake shake..
http://www.g4g.it FireSword

Sorry forgot to post this in the previous comment.. lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT4inJLr-ks (get down)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuI2wdcoxrw (shake)
rinkuhero

I actually get the Ashoka newsletter, so I’m familiar with them, they’re a great group.

If I were to have made a game for that contest I probably would have made one about the evils of the FDA and how high fructose corn syrup and other industrial waste products are destroying our health by pretending to be food :(
Susan Promislo

Hey – thanks so much for the post on the Why Games Matter competition that we co-sponsored with Changemakers. You might also want to know that RWJF just announced an $8.25 million grant to create a new national program, Health Games Research, and continue the work of Games for Health. The new research program will look at specific design elements of health-related games and what about them makes a difference in people’s health behaviors and outcomes. More info. is available on our blog at http://rwjfblogs.typepad.com/pioneer/2007/11/announcing-heal.html.

Thanks!
Susan Promislo, Communications Officer
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation