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Playing 4 Keeps is an innovative youth media project, in which a team of Global Kids Leaders at South Shore High School are gaining leadership and game design skills that they will use to develop and produce a socially conscious online game each year. Once produced, the game will have the potential to educate thousands of young people about a critical global issue.
In the blog La Caixa Dels Meus Pensaments (The Thought Bank), the writer writes about her experiences playing Ayiti. She says, "it's a perfect holistic game to help kids (who live in countries affluent enough to offer access to internet games) understand one form of day-to-day life in less-affluent locales, while also nudging kids to consider their own life choices and the requirements of a healthy routine."
Read the full blog here.
On June 27, 2009, the first (o.o) festival was held. What a success! The daylong festival spotlighted the work from teenagers all over New York, who came together to share their work that they have been doing within the digital media field with their respective programs. The youth have been designing video games, films and other digital tools to advance social causes in a youthful and technologically literate language.
During the festival, many videos were filmed to capture the great work these youth have done. You can see all of the films below or by clicking here.
Continue reading "[staff] First Annual NYC Digital Youth Media & Technology Festival" »
The following appreciation came at the conclusion of our successful effort to scale Global Kids' serious game design program from our schools to the New York Public Library:
This past spring, Global Kids educators worked with select librarians at The New York Public Library to develop an intensive 10-week course on "serious games" for teens. The project focused on the fundamental concepts of "gaming", introduced teens to a range of social justice issues, and empowered them to craft conceptual prototypes of "serious games".In addition to the rich content of their projects, ranging from issues such as media consolidation to drug trafficking, students gained invaluable experience from the challenge of team learning. They developed critical thinking and exercised public speaking skills when they presented their final projects.
The thoughtful design of the program and the dynamic teaching and training methods of Global Kids staff has set a high bar for future teen courses.
Elaine Charnov
Director, Education, Programs, Exhibitions
The New York Public Library
Thanks Elaine!
A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor focuses on video games that let you play with topics taken from the news around us. It spotlights Tempest In Crescent City as an example.
Another featured news game, âHurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City,â developed by Global Kids and Gamepill, focuses on how residents and the government coped after the 2005 storm hit. Players walk through New Orleans after the hurricane, communicating with neighbors and reporters to find a family member.
A recent post by the Techbrarian gives an example of how this teacher is using Ayiti in their class room.
In Haiti only about half of the children receive an education and only two percent finish high school. Without a proper education, the poor stay poor in Haiti (and many countries like this.) While education is the key to rising out of poverty, many parents are not able to send their kids to school. Why not? Play the game below to find out.
My name is Vladimyr and since early April I've been interning with NYPL's teen central on Global Kids' Playing 4 Keeps program. When I first showed up at teen central, everyone was all over the place. But once everything had gotten settled and planned out, the sessions just went by. When we started talking about the game we wanted to create and what should go in it. The gamers(KIDS) just had fun with it, putting in their thoughts, and making it a great atmosphere for everybody. I don't call them kids, I call them gamers. Because they are truly fans of great games, they love great games, and I can truly say that I haven't been around this much gamers before in my life. I tweeted about the day we had to make our own mini game out of chosen objects. That day showed how much fun they have at teen central and the creativity they have, especially working together. I think the best session I've been to was when the guys from Large Animal gaming company stopped by. The kids had finish picking there topic for the game and actually drew pictures and made a storyline for it. A member of teen central named Dominique had to pitch it to the guys who stopped by because the other kids who helped wasn't there. He did a great job and the guys liked it. The gamers at teen central ended up picking Genocide as their game topic. Barry Joseph helped me get this internship because I had nothing to do after I had graduated high school. I would like to thank him and say that being at teen central was probably the best way I've could of spent my free time. I plan on being at the conference on the 27th, cheering teen central on. GOOD LUCK!
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We hope everyone thinks good thoughts for us going into the first annual Knight News Game Awards ceremony Wednesday night as part of the Games for Change Festival. Some of the Playing 4 Keeps student designers will be showing Ayiti: The Cost of Life off to the crowd before the winner is announced.
Wish us luck!
Below is a brief video from the final Global Kids' final training for the New York Public Library for the Playing For Keeps Capacity Building Program.
More info about this program at http://www.playing4keeps.org.
Darren Hayes of the Learning Forward blog posted recently an entry on his thoughts on the Games for Change Toolkit, including thoughts on one of Barry's presentations and his experience playing Ayiti.
You can read his thoughts below or the full entry on his site.
The Toolkit 4 Making Social Issue Games produced by Games for Change is a terrific primer on the state of the industry on serious or social issue games development. This toolkit provides a series of video presentations by leading proponents in the serious games arena and is a great way to start thinking about whatâs out there and whatâs possible.In one of the presentations within the toolkit Barry Joseph, Director of the Online Leadership Program for Global Kids, talked about the planning and production of a game called Ayiti, the Cost of Life. âAyitiâ is the Creole word for âHaiti.
In the game itself you have a family in a village in Haiti and you need to guide them through a series of activities over the course of four years where the family members try to earn money on the farm or at various jobs, you try to provide education for the children, stay healthy as long as possible, and generally confront the âcost of life.â
We were very sorry to see our long-term partner, and digital advisory member, GameLab close its doors this month. GameLab partnered with Global Kids on the powerful game Ayiti: The Cost of Life and over the years published numerous game titles.
It may be the end of an era, but its also the start of something new and we look forward to what comes next for those behind GameLab.
Others commenting on the passing of GameLab:
Here at Global Kids, we have special love for the Game for Change conference, some of that comes from helping co-found it once upon a time. So to share some of that love, we are passing along the latest news on the conference.
Registration has opened for the upcoming 2009 Games for Change conference. This year our own Barry Joseph will be speaking at three sections of the conference - on assessment, on civic engagement, and on our P4K capacity building program. In addition, if you attend, you might get to see him participate in an Iron Chef style game design competition.
Games for Change full release follows below, and after the jump:
The 2009 Sixth Annual Games for Change Festival registration is open and the full schedule announced! Please join us at Parsons The New School for Design in NYC for our annual event which explores the growing movement and emerging field of games for social change and civic engagement.
Continue reading "[P4K] Games for Change 2009 - registration open" »
On Wednesday, April 8, 2009, Global Kids' Playing 4 Keeps youth created game CONSENT! launched officially in the Clemson Teaching Learning sim within the main grid of the virtual world Second Life.
The two hour event was attended by some three dozen avatars who got to be some of the first people within the main grid to play the game and many more who visited and played CONSENT! in the following days.
More info on CONSENT! after the jump.
Continue reading "[P4K] CONSENT! Successfully Launches in Second Life" »
Multimedia & Internet @Schools magazine, in their recent March/April 2009 issue, wrote an article featuring our partners TakingITglobal: "The TIGed Program: A Model for Taking Classrooms Global." One section focused on where they supported us to distribute our Ayiti game to educators:
Case Study: Ayiti Online Game. Educators and TIGed chose to directly engage students in developing a thematic classroom and online educational game about life in Haiti. Youth at South Shore High School collaborated with partners Global Kids and Gamelab to develop Ayiti, a role-playing video game in which the player assumes the roles of family members living in rural Haiti. Players must balance various goals, such as achieving education, making money, staying healthy, and maintaining happiness while encountering unexpected events.The Ayiti game is connected to a thematic classroom toolset, allowing educators to guide their students through an interactive learning experience that includes playing Ayiti. It is an example of a youth-driven project that effectively uses the skills of both educators and web developers to make the students' creative efforts a learning tool - one that speaks the language of youth while raising consciousness about global issues.
In a recent article "Iraq, the Videogame - War is hell. Should it be a game?", Wall Street Journal author Jamin Brophy-Warren writes on the upcoming game focusing on the Iraq War and the merits of serious games spotlighting real life events.
He also highlights other games, such as our own Ayiti, that effectively use serious subject matter and events as their base.
Videogames are not foreign to using real-life events as fodder. Many military games such as some of the popular Call of Duty and Medal of Honor series are based on past American campaigns during the various wars over the last century. The "serious games" movement, which often seeks to teach a particular message or idea, frequently draws on current events as well. MtvU, the college version of Viacom's MTV, launched a Web game called "Darfur is Dying" in 2006 to teach about the atrocities in the Sudan, and non-profit Global Kids and developer Gamelab created "Ayiti: The Cost of Life" that challenges players to keep a virtual family of five alive and healthy in Haiti.
You can read the full article here.
Join Global Kids this week, Wednesday, April 8, 2009, 2:00 - 4:00 PM (EST), 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM (SLT) in the Clemson Teaching Learning, (173, 212, 26) sim for the Second Life main grid opening of the game CONSENT! We will be holding tours of the game, discussing the TSL project & holding question & answer segments throughout.
IM Rhiannon Chatnoir for a teleport during the Second Life event.
CONSENT! is a first person, simulation game based on Harriet A. Washington's book "Medical Apartheid" (www.medicalapartheid.com) in which your avatar assumes the role of an African-American prisoner who has to make tough decisions about whether to choose to 'consent' and submit to medical experiments, which took place during the time period of the 1940s to the present.
The game was designed and developed by Global Kids youth leaders in the Playing 4 Keeps after school program at South Shore High School, NYC using tools in the virtual world of Teen Second Life. Additional building and scripting was also done by the teen-run TSL development company, Digital Refinery.
Find out more information on CONSENT on this blog or on Global Kids Playing 4 Keeps program site.
The Playing 4 Keeps program was made possible through the generous support of Microsoft Corporations US Partners in Learning.
Thank you to Clemson University and the generous use of the Clemson Teaching and Learning Services sim for display of CONSENT!
Our game Ayiti: the Cost of Life was featured in the March online interactive edition of the magazine More 2 Girls. It appears on pages 34-35 of their interactive magazine.
You can download and view the article on their site and even play the game directly through the magazine at www.more2girls.org.
One of the ideas that's been on my mind recently is the importance of developing educational programs through a process of implementation and iteration. This is a somewhat intuitive concept, but has been raised for me recently as I engage in program and curriculum design in the Media Masters program, and as I watch as we begin training New York Public Library educators to implement our Playing 4 Keeps gaming program, the first online program at GK that we're scaling.
With Media Masters, an experimental pilot program that we're partnering with MIT's Project New Media Literacies to conduct, every piece of curriculum and the entire program design is brand new. In each project we engage in, we're taking guesses (educated, of course, but still guesses) as to whether something will work. Will students be interested in creating a wikipedia pages themselves? How long should a process like that take? How do we motivate participants to work collaboratively? And then we try it out, see what happens, circle back around and talk about how it worked. That implementation informs the way that we design and put into practice new projects that work off of similar principles.
Continue reading "[staff] Program design through implementation and iteration" »
Starting next month, Global Kids will be scaling up it's Playing for Keeps (P4K) program into local libraries and community centers in New York and Massachusetts. The first of these workshops is already listed up on the New York Plublic Libary's web site.
Playing For KeepsDate: Wednesday & Thursday, March 18 & 19 Time: 3:00 PM
Audience: young adultsDescription: Play games and check out awesome resources like "Gamestar Mechanic" and the Grow A Game card deck. Learn the process of game design: from mastering core mechanics to creating a design document. Work with Global Kids-trained staff and your peers to develop plans for your own games to address a social issue and then compete to present it to a panel of experts.
All materials will be provided. For ages 12 to 18. This program is being offered through a partnership with Global Kids, Inc., with support from the Microsoft Corporations US Partners in Learning.
If you didn't get a chance to attend last year's Games for Change conference and see Barry's presentation, which was a review of how games used as youth media have evolved over the last six years, it is now up on YouTube.
We mentioned in a recent post the launch of the toolkit from Games For Change (G4C) entitled "Let the Games Begin, A Toolkit 4 Making Social Issues Games." We wanted to write a longer review of it, because there is just so much to say about it.
The toolkit itself is laid out in a neat, interactive flash interface that highlights some of the best moments from the past Game for Change conference along with other resources written and compiled for the toolkit. The entire toolkit is also available to download and view offline.
Among the collection of resources, three of the included documents have never before been made available - they are the design documents made by Gamelab in the course of creating our Playing for Keeps (P4K) game Ayiti. There is also an excellent case study document which was created from Barry Joseph's talk at G4C.
The toolkit has accompanying videos including a talk presented by Barry Joseph and footage of Global Kids own Executive Director Carole Artigiani as well, who speaks on the role of supporting P4K as a non-profit ED. Another video features Shelley Pasnik, of CCT, discussing the evaluation of Ayiti: The Cost of Life. The second half of the video that accompanies the "Urge" section also includes a brilliant talk by Karen Siderman, who created this toolkit, doing a case study of ... you guessed it ... Ayiti!
So, in all, the Toolkit contains four talks on Ayiti and five support documents, one completely new. We couldn't be more proud of how our work with Global Kids youth leaders and Gamelab's production has become the gold standard for the community of the type of Games For Change we all wish to see.
The entire toolkit is an invaluable resource and you can view or download the toolkit here.
There has been a wave of recent posts reflecting and commenting on Ayiti: The Cost of Life.
Trevor Owens in his blog post New Genre: Non-Fiction Video Games, uses Global Kids' Game Ayiti: The Cost of Life to make the argument that it is time to start distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction games.
Try managing the health, education and finances of a family in Haiti. Donât let the cartoon-y look of this one fool you, its pretty grim. There are a ton of other examples of these sort of political games, and some lively discussion of these sorts of games as journalism or as games for change.To abstract a little bit from these specific examples, the game play in each of these games hinges on real world experience; scientific data, historical documents, economic information, and develops a playable space from those experiences. History, science and politics were the first three sub-genera that came to me. What other sub-categories of non-fiction games should we be thinking about? Or am I just completely wrong headed about this?
In this post, the blogger uses Ayiti to "let Barack Obama and his family know about the exceptional power of video games to make the world a better place."
Hot off of Business Wire, AMD just sent out a release about the launch of their new educational toolkit entitled "Let the Games Begin" which is focused on helping organizations create games on topics of social issues. This is all part of their latest support of games based learning and projects like our Playing 4 Keeps game Tempest in Crescent City which was sponsored by their Changing the Game initiative.
Let the Games Begin Toolkit Captures Content from 2008 Games for Change Festival 101 WorkshopSUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the availability of Let the Games Begin: A Toolkit 4 Making Social Issue Games, which helps nonprofit organizations to create social issue games on such topics as the environment, energy consumption, poverty and health. Produced by Games for Change with support from the AMD Foundationâs AMD Changing the Game initiative, the toolkit includes examples of successful games with social content as well as in-depth presentations by key game-design experts.
Much of the content focuses on materials that went into the development of Global Kids' renowned Ayiti: The Cost of Life. You can download the free toolkit online at www.gamesforchange.org/toolkit.
The site Planet 2025 Voices, which focuses on topics relating to creating a sustainable future, posted recently an interesting post reflecting on the power of using games to create real life change. They cited our own Ayiti: the Cost of Life game as a good example:
"...our ability to build a sustainable future is only limited by the boundaries of our imagination. The technologies exist to make this work, two years ago Life in Ayiti - the cost of life won a number of awards. Meanwhile, a fast growing number games for the planet engage contemporary social issues in meaningful ways to foster a more just, equitable and/or tolerant society."
If you haven't already checked out the review that was written by the Conscious Gamer blog site about Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City, it is definitely worth the read and offers up a good game play summary.
According to Tempest's website, the three main goals for the game were 1) Teach players about how everyday residents of New Orleans acted heroically to help each other. 2) Emphasize what are perhaps the two most important priorities in any disaster: communication and use of local resources, needs, and knowledge. 3) Draw attention to the continuing struggle in New Orleans as residents fight for housing in 2008.Tempest did a good job at 1) and 2), highlighting how many residents helped each other during the rescue efforts by sharing food, shelter, medicine, tools and hope. I appreciate the game's positive portrayal of the survival efforts during the disaster because at the time it seemed like all the mainstream press wanted to focus on stories of "looting", "pillaging", "general chaos" perputrated by people of color. Although Tempest was created in 2007 after the Katrina converage had ended, I believe the positive portrayal of all Louisiana citizens both white and people of color sends a subtle, yet very powerful message to players that everyone can be a hero.
Unfortunately in terms of 3), the focus on the continuing struggle for housing, I didn't get the sense that the game raised that issue other than the fact that Vivica is not living back home in Louisiana even one year after being evacuated. A whole new game to focus on the contining struggle for housing and infrastructure could be useful because it's a multifaceted issue facing many communities both in the US and internationally.
Brad Maguth on his blog Global and Social Studies Education posted recently an entry entitled Video Games for Citizenship Education in a Digital Era. In it he discusses video games as not only being great educational resources, but catalysts for youth to participate socially, economically and politically. The post also goes on to list his top ten of Serious Games in which he lists GK's Ayiti: The Cost of Life.
A growing number of today's students are turning towards digital media to participate socially, economically and politically. W. Lance Bennett, in a study commissioned by the MacArthur Foundation on digital media and learning, entitled Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age (2008), describes how digital natives are using new technologies to impact their world. Using the Internet to access information, communicate, and organize, today's youth have demonstrated the power of electronic technologies in making a difference. As evident in the 1999 protest of the WTO in Seattle, young activists are seizing these lines of communicate to arouse bottom-up civic participation. Bennett (2008) describes how many students disengage in traditional top-down politics. Moreover, these same students often find bottom-up politics more relevant and authentic (As evident in increased levels of student participation in volunteering, study abroad and community commitments). Favoring loose networks of community action, these students frequently turn towards electronic technologies like social networking sites to access and discuss economic, social and political issues.Today's digital natives are frequently turning towards electronic communications to learn about and discuss important issues. However, the infusion of these technologies inside the classroom has been lackluster at best. Particular, the area predicated on fostering strong and active democratic citizens, the social studies, has failed to make effective use of electronic technologies (Diem, 2004; Berson, 2005; VanFossen, 2008). There seems to be a mounting divide in the realities of how digital natives are using technology for informed and active democratic citizenship inside versus outside of the social studies classroom (See Maguth, 2008). Thus, the use of outdated mediums for civic education in the social studies results in young people finding them irrelevant and unauthentic. This reinforces a greater divide in teaching and learning. My dissertation research begins to examine this issue more in-depth.
With over 90% of students in a recent survey indicating they frequently play video games (Friedman, 2008), advocacy groups have been moving fast to construct video games for educative purposes. This has led to the creation of 'serious games'. Serious games aim to teach students by realistically simulating some aspect of a given situation. Some examples include: business training games, flight or driving simulators, games that help patients understand how their bodies work, and games the allow players to navigate through and make decisions on a contemporary global issue. Serious games hold great promise in education because they allow users to test and experiment with systems, and develop a better understanding on relationships embedded in the system
Two years ago, the youth in our Playing 4 Keeps program created CONSENT!, a game about medical racism against African American male prisoners. It was based on a chapter from Harriet Washington's remarkable Medical Apartheid.
We tracked her down to tell her about the game and she wrote us this lovely note below, which she gave us permission to reprint here:
From: "Harriet Washington"
Subject: Re: CONSENT!I was happy to hear from you. As it happens I had already seen CONSENT! ( I get alerts on some web entries that mention the titles of my books) and was really impressed. I'm very happy that young people understood the issues so well and am just blown away by their creativity. They- and you- are to be commended for pursuing what's really important in such a smart and innovative manner.
I love your program's focus on global issues by the way. I feel I profited by spending part of my childhood living abroad and I like to think that our period of cultural isolationism is coming to an end, so these kids will need information in a global context, languages etc. My schedule is way overbooked now, but let me know if I can help in the future.
When I see achievements like CONSENT! I feel that the future is in good hands.
Warmly,
Harriet[Harriet Washington] has unearthed an enormous amount of shocking information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book.
The New York Times
2007 PEN Oakland Award, nonfiction; 2007 BCALA Award, nonfiction; 2007 Myers Award
2007 National Book Critics' Circle Award, Nonfiction
www.medicalapartheid.com
Ayiti: The Cost of Life, continues to impact those that play it.
"Never have I played a game where I felt so heartbroken and exposed when it was all over... Never have I been so affected by a game before."
This comes from a review of Ayiti from the EdGames blog created by the learning community of EDTEC 670 at San Diego State University.
What would Obama Play? Suzanne Seggerman, Co-Founder of Games for Change poses this question in her recent article on the power of games for learning and civic engagement.
And games do a lot more than entertain us. In fact games have extraordinary potential for learning and civic engagement across age, economic and other differences. A recent Pew Report showed that 97% of all teenagers are playing games, and that there is a noteworthy correlation between players' civic activities in digital games and their civic engagement in the real world. And last week, a MacArthur Foundation-funded study suggested that online participation equips kids with the media literacy they'll need to be successful adults.For me, the most interesting area is the new genre of video games about real world issues -- games about the environment, global hunger, poverty, disease. These are games that help kids become more thoughtful, responsible and committed citizens. And these games may be the best tool we have to reach and engage them in the issues they will carry into their future.
Why? Games let players interact with a story, rather than passively consume it. This keeps them engaged. Unlike more linear media, players have "agency" -- which means they can affect the outcome of their experience. This encourages personal identification with the characters and, again, a deeper immersion in the content. A well-designed game is an exact balance of challenge and reward, creating a fine-tuned learning environment. And games let people become mentors -- across all age groups. Where else do kids have the chance to be the experts?
Global Kids Playing 4 Keeps teen Tashawna, part of the team who helped develop CONSENT!, takes us on a tour of the project that was created within Teen Second Life during 2006-07. She was asked to narrate it nearly a year after the game was completed. It was created in partnership with youth in the Global Kids after school program and youth developers in Teen Second Life.
In this simulation based on Harriet A. Washington's book "Medical Apartheid" you play as an African-American prisoner who has to make tough decisions about whether to choose to 'consent' and submit to medical experiments from the 1940s to the present.
The game was built within the virtual world of Teen Second Life.
Find out more information on our blog or the Global Kids website.
This program was made possible through the generous support of Microsoft Corporations US Partners in Learning.
