Gaming, only different
“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock-n-roll.”
- Shigeru Miyamoto
For the past three years, Jennifer Ann’s Group has sponsored the Life. Love. Game Design Challenge. Jennifer Ann’s Group is a non-profit from Georgia whose goal is to educate others about the very real dangers of teen dating violence and every year, they’ve been challenging game designers to produce a game that deals with teen dating violence without using any violence in the game itself. This year’s winner was announced today: a game called Grace’s Diary. Try it here, along with all the other contest winners.
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EVOKE is a free social networking game and calls itself “A 10-week crash course in changing the world.” For ten weeks, players match wits and work together to try to complete the ten missions, creating innovative solutions and approaches to some of the world’s most pressing social issues. The best of each 10-week season could find themselves flown to Washington DC for the EVOKE summit, receive seed investments to start their own social ventures and much more. The last season wrapped up earlier this month but if it turned out as well as it sounds, the next season can’t be far behind. Check them out at www.urgentevoke.com and be sure to watch that space for the Season 2!
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Your school may have already snapped this one up, but there’s a (free) real life sim called Real Lives 2010. Each time you play, you will be born as a different person from a 
different country into different life circumstances and live life out so that you can see how other people all over the world live. Maybe you’ll be born rich and marry the person of your dreams, maybe you’ll be born into poverty and barely scrape by. Either way, the game allows you to make decisions for the character and experience the consequences based on the very real statistics of how life is in that country. You can learn more by taking their virtual tour of the game, or download a demo for yourself or request a free copy for your school here.
