An online game launching tomorrow will attempt to spur players into making headway against some of the world’s biggest problems.

CNN details the game, entitled Evoke, which is billed as an entry in the “alternate reality” genre. Developed by the World Bank Institute and designed by Jane McGonigal, the game will last ten weeks. Over the course of that time period, participants will be presented with new challenges and will attempt to make headway against the challenges in real-life. For example, if a current challenge involves famine, players might try “to provide meals for someone in their neighborhood.” Once they have documented their real-world actions, via a blog post, photo or video, they will receive credit for finishing the mission and can receive additional awards and rewards from fellow players.

Upon the game’s completion on May 12, players who complete all 10 challenges will be named a “Certified World Bank Institute Social Innovator – Class of 2010.” The best players can also receive travel scholarships and “online mentorships with experienced social innovators and business leaders from around the world.”

While anyone in the world can play Urgent Evoke, the game is designed for people in Africa, a place, which it’s noted, has less Internet access than anywhere else in the world. To that end, the game has been designed to work seamlessly on cell phones as well. So far 3,500 people have signed up to play the game, 400 of them from Africa.

CNN also has a short video up in which McGonigal gives an overview of Evoke.

A relatively new Chicago school that teaches digital media features a leader that calls traditional academic institutions a “joke.”

The New York Times takes a look inside the Flashpoint Academy of Media Arts & Sciences in downtown Chicago. The school offers two-year programs focused on Film & Broadcast, Recording Arts, Game & Interactive Media or Animation & Visual Effects. Tuition runs around $25,000 a year. Founded in 2007, Flashpoint currently houses 450 students and 26 full time faculty members.

Howard Tullman is President and CEO of the school, and is not a fan of more conventional schooling, calling professor lectures a “joke” and labeling most university film schools a waste of time, as they produce nothing more than “coffee fetchers.”

Flashpoint’s Game Development program serves up four areas of focus: Design, Art (3D Modeling & Animation), Programming and Project Management. Graduates are awarded an Associate of Applied Science degree.
 
One student labeled Flashpoint “the Julliard of digital technology.”

Municipal leaders in New Jersey are split in their reactions to an iPhone game which depicts tanks rolling through their suburban neighborhoods.

Cherry Hill resident  and Cloud Scissor Games Principal Ken Fodero is profiled on NJ.com in a story centered on his new iPhone/iPod Touch game entitled Tank Battles in Suburbia. The game features various New Jersey towns—including Glen Ridge, Edison, Nutley, Summit, Raritan and Bloomfield—as battlegrounds for tank battles. Neighboring houses and private property can be destroyed in the skirmishes, but that decision is ultimately up to the player.

Edison Mayor Antonia Ricigliano wasn’t overly pleased with the game, saying:

Some of these video games are — my goodness — why are they so bent on destruction?

Jordan Glatt, Mayor of Summit, New Jersey, agreed with Ricigliano, stating, “It doesn’t sound like something that’s really constructive to what we’re trying to convey here.  We could be spending our efforts on a lot better things.”

Kathryn Weller-Demming, a Councilwoman-at-large for Montclair, took a more enlightened approach:

I don’t think there’s anything a fictional video game can take away from what’s great about Montclair. Certainly no one should be encouraged to perpetuate violence, but video games don’t raise people. Parents raise people.

Tank Battles in Suburbia is available in the iTunes Store for $1.99.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop have announced the launch of a national competition designed to find, and fund, digital media that will provide breakthroughs in children’s education.

The Cooney Center Prizes for Innovation in Children’s Learning offers prizes in the mobile learning category, where a winner will receive $50,000 towards their entry’s development, and a literacy learning category, from which a winner will receive $10,000, in addition to the possibility of their project being used as part of Sesame Street’s revival of the Electric Company television show.

Cooney Center Executive Director Dr. Michael H. Levine added:

Billions of dollars are spent every year by parents on the growing plethora of digital games, toys, mobile devices, and online experiences for children.  However, research demonstrates that the vast majority of these products have only tapped a minimal amount of educational value. The new prizes are intended to offer real incentives to digital media entrepreneurs who would like to do well by creating new ways to help children learn.

Applicants must be U.S. citizens and submissions are due by midnight, April 1, 2010. A jury will select up to five finalists in each category, who will then be invited to this year’s E3 Expo in order to pitch their idea.

The jury includes ex-Electronic Arts CEO Bing Gordon, Activision SVP of Production (for Guitar Hero) Laird Malamed, Apple’s Vice President of Education John Couch and Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell.

Because they are engaging and motivational on their own, a Canadian professor is convinced that videogames can eventually be a reliable means to improve a player’s mental health.

Dr. Mark Baldwin of Montreal’s McGill University is a leader in this fledgling field, having already released a PC game in 1997 called MindHabits Trainer. It’s claimed that spending only five minutes a day with the title can improve confidence and reduce stress in participants.

Baldwin told Canada.com that while there is certainly room for advances in this field, there may be a ceiling in terms of how much a player can be affected. He doesn’t think, for example, that such a trainer would ever be able to convince someone that they are a good person, but that improving abilities like learning how to ignore criticism should be possible.

One level from the MindHabits Trainer has players trying to find a single smiling face among a sea of those with frowns. Baldwin explained what these types of game mechanics can do for a player:

It's just like Pavlov's dog. This boosts self-esteem, makes people feel a little less aggressive in response to insults. It's a long way from being a therapy of any kind; these things are games and little laboratory tasks. But someday I think there's going to be some use for this as a part of some kind of psychological intervention.

The release of games such as Brain Age and the Wii Fit in the past few years has furthered Baldwin’s optimism for what the coming years might bring:

In terms of where the future goes, that's what makes me hopeful that the application idea is growing and the line between them will get blurred and you'll see more of these positive efforts being integrated with entertainment-type games.

A 15-person student development team from DePaul University has released a PC game inspired by artist M.C. Escher.

Created over five months by members of DePaul’s Game Dev program, Devil’s Tuning Fork utilizes sound visualization as a means to guide players through interactive environments, echoing perception techniques used by dolphins and bats.

The student developers were assisted by a group of advisors, led by former Bungie Software President, and DePaul “game designer in residence” Alex Seropian.  Other advisors included ex-Midway Games Senior Producer Bill Muehl.

Devil’s Tuning Fork is one of 192 entries in the 2010 Independent Games Festival Student Competition. The full title can be downloaded at no charge from the game’s website.

Hope turned to despair for the UK videogame industry as accounts circulate today that the long-awaited pre-budget report will not offer any kind of tax breaks or incentives for those creating interactive entertainment.

The Guardian reported ahead of Chancellor Alistair Darling’s (pictured) speech that the government was expected to reject the idea of tax breaks, which several other sources following the pre-budget report live are verifying now.

Trade group TIGA, long a champion of such tax breaks expressed dismay over the unfolding events, calling the lack of Games Tax Relief a “serious mistake and a failure of imagination.”

As part of a long statement, TIGA CEO Richard Wilson stated:

The Government has shown itself willing to support the UK Film Industry through tax relief, the oil industry with tax breaks, declining manufacturing businesses with loans and grants, and has spent billions bailing out the banking industry.

 

The UK video games industry has the potential to be world beating. Yet we cannot will the end without providing the means: the Government must invest in the industry if it wants it to remain world leading.

He continued:

We have consistently warned the Government that without the introduction of a Games Tax Relief the video games development sector will likely decline by 5% each year over each of the next five years. Conversely, if a Games Tax Relief is introduced, then the industry will eventually enjoy annual growth of 4%.

Wilson vowed that TIGA would “redouble” its efforts to convince policymakers of “the need to invest in our sector.”

Britain boasted the third-largest game development community in the world for the better part of three decades, trailing only the U.S. and Japan. By some estimates the UK now ranks fourth or fifth, behind Canada and South Korea, as tax incentives continue to lure developers to more favorable pastures.

Developer 2dboy’s “Pay-What-You-Want” anniversary sale for its World of Goo videogame has been deemed a “huge success.”

Normally sold for $20 on the 2dboy website, and also offered through other services like Steam and WiiWare, the World of Goo sale resulted in some 57,000 people purchasing the game. The ability for consumers to pay what they wanted to for the title also generated an enormous amount of publicity, further benefiting sales.

2dboy’s Ron Carmel took to the company website to share a wealth of data from the special offer. The average price paid for the game was $2.03, while almost 17,000 people chose to pay a single cent and another 21,000 plus paid between 2 cents and $1.99. The next largest category was the $5.00 to $5.99 range, with over 7,300 customers. At the other end of the spectrum, 4 people chose to pay $50.00 for the game.

Sales of World of Goo also rose 40% on Steam, though the increase on the WiiWare side wasn’t as dramatic, with a 9% increase.

Once the sale was underway, 2dboy added a survey (results can be viewed here) to the checkout procedure in order to try and get a handle on why people chose to pay a certain amount. The top answer to that question was "I Like the Pay-What-You-Want Model and Wanted to Support It" with 24%. Runner up, with 21.4%, was "That’s All I Can Afford Right Now."

2dboy has extended the sale to run through Sunday, October 25.

|Via Gamasutra|

The recent controversy brewing around the aggressive trademark defense tactics of game developer Tim Langdell has sparked a petition to remove him from the executive board of the International Game Developers Association.

GamesLaw reports that game writer Corvus Elrod is the creator of the online petition. Elrod hopes to obtain signatures from at least 10% of the organization's members. If so, he will present the petition to the board "and force them to call a special meeting of the membership to vote on Tim Langdell’s removal."

Dan Rosenthal, editor of GamesLaw, comments on the increasingly unpleasant situation:

This is obviously a huge issue, especially for a very troubled IGDA. There have been recent questions in mainstream blogs and those of several high profile industry members questioning what exactly IGDA is providing to its members. The trademark issue further fans the flames of allegations that IGDA isn’t doing enough, and it’s being talked about by key industry figures...

Rosenthal mentions that he hopes to discuss the Langdell/IGDA situation at his Legal Issues in Gaming panel at the upcoming PAX 2009.

France and England both mandate that video game projects be culturally relevant in order to qualify for financial incentives. But the head of the European Game Developers Federation told gamesindustry.biz that such requirements make little sense either culturally or as a matter of economic policy.

Guillaume de Fondaumiere (left), who is also an exec with Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream, spoke to gi.biz at the recent GameHorizon conference:

The cultural test is a problem... When you look at [European Union] rules, you have to ask: 'Actually, what is culture?' It's a national decision, so it's kind of weird that we, as the videogame industry, have to work with standards that other cultural areas don't have to follow.

To me, all games are cultural. Videogames aren't just a form of entertainment, but a true form of cultural expression, and I think that in twenty years' time this will be a given. No one will dispute that any more...

We know that tax breaks are extremely effective in stimulating an industry, and I think again that Montreal and Quebec have shown us the way...

So I think it's high time for governments, and the EU, to understand that money given in the form of tax breaks to the industry is not money thrown away. It's an investment with a very high return, so it's time that we had those breaks.

Jason Della Rocca, who stepped down in April following a nine-year stint as executive director of the International Game Developers Association, offered his impressions about the hiring of his successor, Joshua Caulfield.

On his Reality Panic blog Jason writes:

My parting advice to the IGDA board was to hire an association professional - and specifically NOT a game person... Ultimately, what the IGDA needed (and part of the reason why I left) was someone who has real experience with leading a non-profit association, who can be a partner with the board of directors, can drive forward on governance issues, rope in wide ranging stakeholders, understand the financial/legal landscape and membership models, etc, etc...

Good luck Joshua, the community is watching!

Jason, who had many accomplishments as IGDA boss, once rather memorably spurned the opportunity to debate with Jack Thompson.

As GamePolitics reported yesterday, German retailer Galeria Kaufhof is dropping 18+ video games and movies from its inventory in the wake of last week's horrific school shooting.

Reuters has reaction to the move from Stephan Reichart, who heads G.A.M.E., a trade association which represents German game developers:

I think (Kaufhof's decision) is a complete overreaction... it borders on impulsive hysteria. It would be sufficient if retailers made sure their cashiers don't sell this material to young people.

Since 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer's rampage, reports have emerged indicating that he played the first-person shooters Counter-strike and Far Cry 2.