Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

Adam Phillips, writing for ‘Voice of America - Our World’, reported on the upcoming Global Kids, Playing 4 Keeps game focusing on Haiti, at the Games for Change conference that took place New York City.

An excerpt from his article is below.

The Games 4 Change conference also highlighted ways young people are being empowered to design their own game. At Global Kid's Playing 4 Keeps, an after school program in one New York City high school, students work with professional game designers to create a game based on a global issue of their choice.

Student designers in the afterschool Playing for Keeps program tackled the problems of life for Haiti's poor people in their video game.

In this project, students created a game set in Haiti that explored the relationship of poverty and education to human rights. It is based on five virtual family members who make a series of choices regarding work, education, health and other factors over the course of four virtual years. The group then studies the possible outcomes.


Global Kids Online leadership program director Barry Joseph said that creating games like that requires an understanding not just of the games but also of the complex global issues they portray.

"When you start developing a game you have to create a simulation or a model of the thing you are trying to demonstrate," he said, "[such as] how to look at a system and understand it as a system. What are the constituent parts? What are the elements? How do they relate to each other? What do you need to do within that context to push the system in one direction or another? Whether you're talking about poverty in Haiti or you are talking about genocide in Darfur, that is the kind of education you need to survive in a globalized workplace, games offer that kind of learning."

While it can be hard to measure objectively what impact these new games are having on the real world, Joseph said they are having a subtle but significant impact on the players themselves. He believes the games offer young people an important, positive way to express themselves and their desire to work for a better world. And by playing the games with their friends - and raising public awareness in the process, Joseph said young people can experience for the first time what it feels like to work for positive change.

Read the full article here.

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Listen to the audio or download it here