• by Kate Kaye , June 9, 2004

Mom always said playing video games was good for nothing. Participants in the invitation-only "Serious Issues, Serious Games" conference would beg to differ.

Interactive games are "not simply the media equivalent of the hula hoop," declared Carl Goodman, curator of digital media and director of New Media Projects at the American Museum of the Moving Image. Held Tuesday at Manhattan's New York Academy of Sciences, the event comes on the heels of the first-ever Serious Games Summit, which took place in March during the annual Game Developers Conference.

These days, advertisers brand interactive games to promote their wares, the U.S. Army uses them for recruitment, and police departments employ them to run virtual drills. Now, some groups are educating with Web games to promote social and policy issues. Serious Games themes range from HIV/AIDS and poverty to public policy and New York City's budget.

The Peter Packet Game and Challenge was spawned by Cisco Systems in conjunction with NetAid, an international organization that battles poverty, in order to spur interest among the children of Cisco employees in the fight against indigence. Educational nonprofit Global Kids, Inc. aims to inspire youth to create serious games of their own. The organization worked with gameLab--a game development firm that has counted Lego, Microsoft Corp., and PBS among its clients--to design Playing 4 Keeps, a process for teaching kids how to develop games. The project hatched a prototype for The Profiler, a game intended to educate children about balancing national security with civil liberties.

According to Barry Joseph, member of the event's steering committee and director of Global Kids' online leadership program, he and his cohorts from nonprofits, game development outfits, and foundations converged at the conference to "explore games as a tool for social change and as a mechanism for achieving the social missions of our work."

New York City residents who gripe about the games their public officials play can relieve aggression through games featured on the Gotham Gazette Web site, published by the nonprofit research and education group Citizens Union Foundation of the City of New York. Breakdown pairs animation with trivia questions, inviting gamers to "help save the city from kaput." The New York City Budget Game allows players to raise and lower taxes, and determine just where all that money goes.

Inspiring excitement about dry issues such as the city budget--or the often distressing stuff of documentaries--can be a daunting task. P.O.V. Interactive extends the tales told in PBS's P.O.V. documentary series to the Web. Its Internet series, P.O.V. Borders, uses interactive games to complement episodes that have focused on immigration and environmental issues.

"Our films tend to be depressing," commented Theresa Riley, director of P.O.V. Interactive, during a conference panel entitled Getting Games Built. "We wanted something more fun and engaging."

Riley hopes to continue creating games for the Borders series, but noted that budgetary constraints are always a factor for P.O.V. Interactive. The same is true of most nonprofit organizations, so equating the idea of game development with the graphically rich, multimillion-dollar CD-ROM games that keep kids glued to the TV can deter some from taking serious games seriously. The cost of game development can run anywhere from under $50,000 to $20 million, according to panelist Eric Zimmerman, co-founder and CEO of gameLab. Games built for P.O.V. Interactive have each cost "quite a bit less" than $50,000, said Riley.

Money is also an issue for Beth Noveck, associate professor of law and director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy and the Democracy Design Workshop at New York Law School. She's involved in developing a game to teach people about participation in the government process by enabling them to create virtual "civic fairs." The game is set to launch in the fall, and will generate revenue by selling virtual ad space and charging businesses and interest groups fees to occupy their cyber civic spaces.

"We're trying to leverage existing technologies" to cut costs, Noveck said, adding: "Most of the resources are going towards marketing and awareness."