Can virtual reality (VR) be at the center of a global impact campaign? Can VR be a tool that expands learning and engagement?
Since 2004, Games for Change (G4C) has empowered game creators, students, educators, and social innovators to drive real-world impact through games and immersive media.
Drawing inspiration from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), the 2024 Games for Change Festival theme was The 2030 Marker: A Catalyst for Global Change. It brought together global voices to ignite community engagement and drive social change, demonstrating how games break down barriers to connect people across generations and around the globe. The Festival showcased the games and XR industry’s capacity for innovation, creativity, and social impact leadership in critical areas related to the SDGs, such as sustainability, accessibility, health, education, and more.
The 2024 edition of the annual Festival, produced by one of the SIE Society’s Storytelling Partners, was an impressive success. Here are some of this year’s highlights:
- More than 2,000 in-person and virtual attendees attended panels, talks, workshops, and topic tables.
- The following links list the Speakers and the Schedule for the festival: https://festival.gamesforchange.org/2024-speakers and https://festival.gamesforchange.org/schedule
- Nearly 40 games and XR experiences featured at this year’s G4C Arcade at Parsons and at ONX in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
- 200 networking meetings through the G4C App fostered new and valuable connections between organizations ranging from individual Developers and Academics to major corporations such as Microsoft with its X-Box, Minecraft games, and also multinational organizations such as UNESCO.
- The G4C Awards Ceremony celebrated outstanding projects and honored Twitch, Minecraft, Venba, and Alyssa Sweetman for their contributions to the games industry.
- G4C and Google Play announced winners of the Diverse Voices, New Stories Challenge, and launched the third year of the program.
- We welcomed Anjali Bhimani as our first G4C Ambassador to champion the power of games around the world.
- G4C launched its official TikTok account!
William Nix, our Founding Member and Co-Executive Director, represented the SIE Society at the 2024 Conference. He moderated a Panel on on “Creating, Measuring & Assessing Impact” with SIES Head of Impact Measurement/Plus Media Solutions CEO, Julie Davitz, Evan Hirsch, CEO of PlayNice, and Levi Braslow, Social Impact Strategy, Data and Technology Consultant. Each of the participants covered their own experience in developing both quantitative and qualitative techniques for designing and assessing how content “landed” with audiences. This analysis informed both the financing and the creative aspects of their respective projects. Because creative endeavors need to balance the business and the experiential aspects of projects, the insights from these experts were particularly informative to everyone in attendance.
In addition, Will made a presentation entitled “”Social Impact Entertainment Financing” during a Meet the Funders session at the Conference, where he discussed philanthropic and other non-traditional methods of funding social impact entertainment of all types of media. Among others, the Amplifying Impact Fund collaboration between Partners in Kind/SIE Society: https://siesociety.org/pik-sie-society and that of the LOHAS firm: https://lohas.org were covered as examples of how the SIE and Finance communities are joining forces to collaboratively create new methods of underwriting. Susanna Pollack, President of www.GamesforChange.org, announced that G4C will post session videos to the G4C YouTube channel, including these two presentations.
Clearly, videogames, immersive, and other Storytelling media forms are playing an increasingly important role in creating positive social impact by reaching new audiences with different forms of engagement. This tracks with the Mission of the SIE Society to focus on all media platforms for SIE Storytelling as we grow the members of our SIE community.
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