If you are interested in how serious games can solve problems around the world, you will want to check out a festival designed to highlight the impact games can have across many different industries. Every year the Games for Change Festival showcases cutting edge games that target areas of concern in healthcare, environmental impact, research, human rights, economics, education and many other major issues.
Boosting Civic Engagement With Gamification In Ovar, Portugal There are many approaches politicians use to try to encourage civic involvement and voter participation. Talking about government budgets is usually not one of them but the Portuguese town of Ovar took to a gamification approach to civic discussion, and to the politicians’ surprise, learned that it was a…
Gamification is at the point where it is surpassing its infant stage of creating PBL (point-badge-leaderboard) experiences, which were typically met with enormous initial successs followed by gradual deterioration.
Gamification is now headed towards solving real business problems with innovative game-play (beyond PBL techniques) by motivating action with civic engagement. It is evident that the industry will soon revamp its approach from designing just for engagement to include engagement tactics that infuses is users with a much greater purpose. While this is a very promising idea, the industry is still does not understand, address and reflect the millennial expectations – which can also explain the failure of most shallow PBL-based designs.
Community planning meetings are often times an unpleasant experience for any potential attendees. Participants occasionally have to deal with long-winded formal proceedings, dull meetings and repetitive discussion points just to put forth their personal inputs on key issues. In short, this traditional form of civic planning can be a rather inefficient and tedious process, which discourages local residents from actual engagement.
Now, what if there was a way to make civic planning not only simpler to participate but engaging as well? Designed by the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College (one of many labs across the US), Community PlanIt is a game that aims to get local citizens more involved with community planning.
Prior to the 2012 elections, MTV was working on new ways to better engage US citizens to be involved in the American democratic process. With support from the Knight Foundation, MTV conceived Fantasy Election 2012, an online game which gave users a new way to hold electoral candidates accountable while being rewarded for getting involved in the electoral process.
This Wednesday, the BMW Guggenheim Lab opened to the public. Located in New York City, just north of Houston Street and the Sarah D. Roosevelt Park, the aim of the project is serve as a platform for positive interactions in city planning and to examine the spaces that we all share. The traveling lab includes…
I recently sat down with Veer Gidwaney, founder and CEO of DailyFeats, to discuss some of the ways that the company is helping to “get people to achieve their maximum potential every single day” using gamification, points, and badges (or in this case “feats”). We introduced DailyFeats earlier in our blog, but some of the most…
Education games have a tenuous history. I’m sure many readers brought up during the early days of attempts to put computers in school still harbor a deep loathing for Mavis Beacon and a deep confusion as to why teachers thought playing Oregon Trail exclusively for the hunting portion was educational in any way. Times have…
