The corporate gaming industry is justifiably criticized for producing primarily “shoot ‘em up” games. It’s nice to see that there are conversations and resources for social-change games.
In Tim Lauer’s post I came upon this article: Can Social-Change Video Games Tackle Divorce, Poverty, Genocide? and I thought yes, ok, let’s hear what game developers are saying and doing.
I always appreciate the “yes, but …” voice. S/he is usually experienced and sophisticated in wisdomed way. S/he brings up those ugly things, the practical things, the idealist can’t or won’t seem to hear.
I just started a class at Claremont University. The other students are primarily k-12 teachers, in and around the LA area. Claremont is about equity education and social justice themes. It’s telling perhaps, that in a class of about 15, me being one of “oldest” by far, from the looks of their faces, I was one of 2 people taking notes on my laptop. Notebooks? Pens? But you’re 25, you’re supposed to be a net -gener?
“Other People’s Children” by Lisa Delpit and “The Schools we need and why we don’t have them” by E.D. Hirsh, introductory readings to a class on learning theories and pedagogies gave more words to my typical “yes, but…” voice. Or should I change that to “yes, and …”?

“In the end, Koster proved to be knocking the legs out from the Games for Change movement in order to champion what he cherishes most about games: their levity. It wasn’t a happy kind of levity he was praising as much as it was the fact that games are good at making no situation seem altogether dire — nor outright intractable. The problem with the world’s real-life issues, he said, is that the crisis of Darfur and the squalor of Haiti seem insurmountable. People throw up their hands in a way they don’t with problems posed in a video game.”

I’ve got big gaps, isolated dots looking for connections because I see these issues from several angles. Teaching and learning social change, being social change, being a victim, being completely isolated from poverty, or completely consumed by it. “The biggest thing social change is mostly lacking is worldwide will.” That’s probably the biggest gap. We’ve got the money, the ideals, the knowhow.