Games for Change splits in two, beefs up education offerings

The Games for Change Festival, an annual gathering that for the past 12 years has pushed the video game industry to use its powers for good, is expanding.

For the first time, the New York-based event this year will split into two separate events, with a “Games and Media Summit” taking place in April in partnership with Tribeca Film Festival. The traditional festival will move to late June.

Organizers say the shift to summer will, for one thing, allow more teachers and students to attend as the festival’s focus on education grows.

An education-oriented one-day summit took place in 2015, separate from the main festival. But bringing the education focus into the main festival in a bigger way “allows us to focus on extending the conversation around games as a means for learning,” said Susanna Pollack, the organization’s new president. “That was important to us, to program that session outside of the school year.”

She said the festival will offer a limited number of discounted tickets to teachers, students and independent game developers.

Games for Change will also expand its annual game design prizes — traditionally, judges have handed out just four prizes for individual games: Best Gameplay, Most Significant Impact, Most Innovative and Game of the Year.

This year, they’ll add a fifth category: Best Learning Game.

“We wanted to demonstrate our commitment to acknowledging the power of games for learning,” Pollack said.

The festival will also feature neuroscience games — one, from MIT, seeks to map the brain — augmented-reality museum games and a demonstration of a tool developed by Major League Baseball that uses wearable sensors and data crunching to “enhance team performance and game-day decision making and strategy.”

The April summit will also feature a $10,000 competition for a digital game idea that engages young people “to think differently about savings, debt and financial security.” The contest is sponsored by the Ad Council and the American Institute of CPAs.

Originally held in June 2004 at the New York Academy of Sciences, the first Games for Change was little more than a retreat for industry insiders and intellectuals trying to figure out how video games could be something more than simply tools for entertainment, socializing and improving hand-eye coordination. That first half-day event attracted just 42 attendees.

This year, organizers expect more than 800 people in June, with the April summit bringing in another 300.

The Games and Media Summit takes place on April 18; the Games for Change Festival takes place June 23-24. For more information: gamesforchange.org

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo