Before walking into the large, seemingly spacious (except for seats) auditorium of the New School, I completely underestimated the popularity and importance of games in the world. Starting from the warm applause given to the first keynote, to the last neuroscience presentation on the second day, my interest for established, newfound, and evolving games grew tremendously. When I playtested in the marketplace, I w
as shocked at how enthusiastic every team was about their game—although it was understandable, considering how tirelessly they worked to get each game to their current stages. The one game I really enjoyed playing was that involving Native Americans and their arctic journey. While playing this mindless game, I was watching the animation and was thinking it was rather simple, but reflecting on our own GFS experiences trying to create animations, it hit me how difficult it must have been to first learn the animation program and then create their desired characters/events. Games for Change enabled me to give the attention and respect to games/game creation process that they deserved.
For Games for Seva, I think our team now has more motivation to make progress on the games throughout the year, because of the respect new games had in the marketplace/live presentation events. Knowing how popular and desired new developers are (to researchers), I believe that the start to finish times of our new games will decrease. I think one of our goals for next year when we return to Games for Change (which I know we will) should definitely be to create a presentation with our group of kids and propose our new game (Swach Ganga) to the crowd. This could be a good way to make the game even more popular, and to gain experience marketing our product. Overall, I believe that Games for Change was a refreshing experience that was much needed to put our games and potential games into the context of the world.