January 24, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Foundations are paying for two new efforts to support the burgeoning field of video games designed to promote social change and better health.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago, has awarded a $450,000 grant to Games for Change and Parsons New School for Design, both in New York, to create a research and design laboratory — PETLab, which stands for the Prototyping, Evaluating, Teaching, and Learning Laboratory.
“Games let people try on perspectives and roles otherwise unavailable to them,” says Suzanne Seggerman, president of Games for Change and co-director of PETLab. Just like a flight-simulation game can give players a feel for the “complex nature of flying,” she says, an environmental video game, for example, could help them understand the effects that rising sea levels or electricity usage can have on the environment.
In its first year, PETLab will work with MTV to create prototypes of games for its youth-activism Web site, Think.MTV.com, and with Microsoft to develop a curriculum that universities across the country can use to make social-purpose games on the company’s Xbox video-game platform.
Working with such corporations will help increase the number of people whom public-interest games can reach, says Colleen Macklin, director of PETLab and chair of communication design and technology at Parsons.
“Scalability and distribution is something that comes up all the time when developers are interested in creating games for the social interest or for learning,” she says.
Meanwhile, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, N.J., is turning its attention to measuring the impact that video games can have on improving health with an $8.25-million grant to establish a new Health Games Research program.
The program’s first round of grants, up to $2-million, will support research on games that increase physical activity or improve players’ own health behaviors, such as adhering to a medical-treatment plan.
The foundation is interested both in video games specifically designed to promote better health and in the application of commercial games for health purposes.
As an example, Chinwe Onyekere, a program officer at the foundation, points to the Nintendo Wii, a popular video-game system with wireless controllers that allow players to compete in sports like tennis, baseball, and even fishing.
“It’s a really fantastic example of how you can play a video game in a completely different way that actually gets you active and moving,” she says. “It gets people up off the couch and interacting with the game, but also with the other players who are playing the game with them.”
