Gaming For A Cause

A common goal of modern websites is to provide opportunities to engage. Rather than simply reading and watching, we want to encourage folks to give us feedback, to subscribe, to volunteer, to sign up for an event, to donate or purchase something, to collaborate. I particularly like working on the content challenge - what compelling words and visuals will grab your attention? What will help you understand our goals, and to adopt them as your goals too?

Its challenging to produce a concise, compelling story to illustrate what are often complex problems with various interrelated challenges. It's one thing to produce a short story about a kid in the foster care system who "made it", and quite another to illustrate the complex and maddening government process this same kid had to navigate year after year.

Can games help? A number of organizations have tried. And the strategy would seem to make sense - a recent Pew study finds that more than half of American adults play video games, including a third of those over 65. An interesting example is the ReDistricting Game, which invites people to engage in many of the same decisions elected officials make when determining congressional districts. Another is Escape from Woomera, a game that reconstructs Australian immigration detention centers, and invites players to explore and attempt to break out of these facilities. The Planet Green Game, a collaboration between Starbucks and Global Green USA, challenges players to green a virtual town. Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, allow players to define themselves anew and build communities - nonprofits from TechSoup to NPR engage large constituencies this way.

Games allow the producer to define the rules for engagement tightly coupled with a visual story, helping to direct participants to make various choices that illustrate critical consequences of our actions in real life.

Developing game applications on a small nonprofit budget is challenging, but can be doable. NTEN sponsored a session on video games for social change in 2007 to in part address this point. I am interested to learn more about afforable strategies for nonprofits to use gaming as an engagement strategy.