
Most of the public dialogue has been around the negative aspects. Why don’t we have a Corporation for Public Gaming?įor a long time, people just looked at computer and videogames as frivolous at best, and at worst, things that have been really bad for you. They’ve had an enormous impact on closing the gap between what the commercial TV and radio industries don’t accomplish and what each medium is capable of doing. We’re at a point where it’s less about convincing people that games are a social impact medium that should be looked at and more about this question: “How can we most effectively leverage this medium for the public good?” We have a Corporation for Public Broadcasting in this country. Additionally, the White House is sponsoring multiple game-based contests around childhood obesity and around STEM learning - science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Today, almost every major foundation and major government agency is either funding games or looking at funding games. Have they scaled to millions or 10 millions? Not yet, but I am confident as we raise the sector, they will.

There are, certainly, a lot of examples of people who have created games that have created behavior change in the real world.

Can games in the digital space jump over and create behavior change in the real world in mass numbers?Ībsolutely, but it’s not simple.
