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The book provides a contemporary foundation in designing social impact games. It is structured in 3 parts: understanding, application, and implementation. The book serves as a guide to designing social impact games, particularly focused on the needs of, media professionals, indie game designers and college students. It serves as a guide for people looking to create social impact play, informed by heuristics in game design.
Key Features
Provides contemporary guide on the use of games to create social impact for beginner to intermediate practitioners
o Provides design and implementation strategies for social impact games
Provides wide ranging case studies in social impact games
Provides professional advice from multiple social impact industry practitioners via sidebar interviews, quotes, and postmortems
Provides a quick start guide on creating a variety of social impact engagements across a wide variety of subjects and aims
List of contents
1. Introduction to Social Impact Play and Games 2. Designing for Social Impact-Overview 3. Engagement Design and Serious Play 4. Education Games 5. Games for Mental and Physical Health 6. Newsgames: Reportage and Simulation Games 7. Persuasive Play 8. Empathy Games 9. Community Games 10. Human Computation Games 11. Assessing Impact Efficacy 12. Designing with Clients and Subject Matter Experts 13. Implementation
About the author
Lindsay Grace is Knight Chair of Interactive Media and an associate professor at the University of
Miami School of Communication. He is Vice President of the Higher Education Video Game Alliance,
and founded the American University Game Lab and Studio, which completed hundreds of thousands
of dollars in purpose driven play designs annually. Clients included the US National Institutes of Mental
Health (NIMH), the Educational Testing Service (ETS), The World Bank, VOX Media and others.
His personal creative work has received awards and recognition from the Games for Change Festival,
the Digital Diversity Network, the Association of Computing Machinery's digital arts community, Black
Enterprise and others. This work has been selected for showcase internationally including New York,
Paris, Sao Paolo, Singapore, Chicago, Vancouver, Istanbul, and more. Lindsay curated or co-curated the
Blank Arcade exhibits (2015-2019), Smithsonian American Art Museum's SAAM Arcade (2014-2017),
the Games for Change Civic and Social Impact (2017) and others.
He has given talks and keynotes at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), SXSW, the Games for Change
Festival, the Online News Association, the Society for News Design, Smithsonian Institutes, and many
other industry events. His opinions on games have been offered by CNN, Al-Jazeera, National Public Radio
and others. He has been teaching games and interactive media design for more than a decade.
Summary
A contemporary foundation in designing social impact games, this book serves as a guide to designing social impact games with focus on the needs of, media professionals, indie game designers and college students. It is a guide for people looking to create social impact play in game design
