The National Endowment for the Arts gave $50,000 to fund the 9th Annual Games for Change Festival, a conference focused on “the creation and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts.” One featured game, Zombie Yoga, “uses Yoga and visualization to empower the player emotionally.” Another game puts players through life situations that would increase someone’s risk for HIV.
Workshops, networking, and speakers discussed how to design video games for the common good. One workshop, “Yourturn!: Designing a music game for social impact,”focused on using “social interaction and identity construction among youth minority groups in Vienna, Austria.” “Game-o-matic: A tool for generating journalistic games on the fly” helped journalists think about news “as systems rather than as stories.” Another workshop featured Deepak Chopra, a popular public speaker on spirituality who discussed his Nintendo Wii video game designed to connect people to “their own internal power to be happy.”
Though its goals are laudable, the federal funding directed to this festival would have been better spent providing direct help to the poor, such as antiretroviral drugs for many HIV patients on waiting lists for drugs from the Ryan White program
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