Somewhat lost in the pre-E3 buzz is the 6th Annual Games For Change Festival, currently underway in New York City.

The show has a terrific lineup of speakers, including Ian Bogost, Henry Jenkins, Clive Thompson, Lucy Bradshaw, N'Gai Croal, and James Paul Gee.

For updated G4C Festival news, check out the official Games For Change Twitter feed.

A new alternate reality game examines the future of caring in America.

Ruby's Bequest challenges players to make the fictional town of Deepwell a more caring place in order to earn a sizeable sum left by the mysterious Ruby Wood. The game will continue through April 10th.

From the ARG site's description:

Like Grover's Corners or Lake Wobegon, Deepwell is a fictional place. Deepwell's people, however, are alive (played by actors) and Deepwell's story is not preordained – it's up to our participants to shape its outcomes. In the next 60 days, as Deepwell moves forward into the next decade, its viewers will be traveling along. As they experience the future's challenges to the way we care for one another, they can respond with perspectives, ideas and solutions. Ruby's Bequest is a place where people with any level of experience with caring can meet and collaborate on visions of a more caring future...

 

Like Deepwell, America faces a future in which the ecosystems of caring grow more stressed. When you contribute your perspectives, stories and common sense to help Deepwell solve its problems, you are actually helping our nation anticipate its future challenges and craft its wisest responses. Each contribution helps us collectively to arrive at larger truths.

Via: BoingBoing

The Games for Change Festival has opened registration for attendees. The 2009 G4C will take place in New York City, May 27-29 at Parsons The New School for Design.

A press release describes the event:

The Annual Games for Change Festival brings together the world's leading foundations, NGOs, game-makers, academics, and journalists to explore this potential and how best to harness games in addressing the most critical issues of our day, from poverty to climate change, global conflicts to human rights... 

Called "the Sundance of video games" for "socially-responsible game-makers" we're promoting a new genre of video game - games to change the world - for the better. 

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times will deliver the keynote. Other speakers include:

• A fireside chat with leading scholars Jim Gee and Henry Jenkins
• A conversation between Lucy Bradshaw, Executive Producer, Spore, Electronic Arts and N'Gai Croal, Newsweek
• Ian Bogost, CEO of Persuasive Games
• Heather Chaplin, journalist and author of Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution.
• Seth Scheisel, New York Times game critic and technology journalist

As we saw in 2008 with Breakthrough's immigration rights-themed I.C.E.D!, non-profits are increasingly turning to game tech to reach a wider - and younger - audience.

Along that line Ars Technica reports that Games for Change has released a toolkit designed to help non-profits tap learn how to tap into issue-oriented games of their own.

The Games for Change Toolkit is primarily a Flash-based presentation containing video, reference material, and links to demonstration games that cover various aspects of game design, from the initial concept to production and distribution. While an actual [software development kit] may not be involved, the toolkit introduces nonprofit organizations to both the broad potential and finer details of bringing an issue-conscious game into reality...

The Toolkit covers seven primary topics and introduces each with a video snippet of their relative presenter's speech: Urge, Concept, Design, Production, Distribution, Evaluation, and Case Study...

Singapore's The Straits Times reports on an in-development game in which players use the "cheery pink power of bubblegum" to fight government oppression.

Gumbeat is a Flash game being developed as part of a cooperative effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and digital media students in Singapore. So how does Gumbeat play? From the report:

...the heroine chews on candy and blows them into big pink bubbles beside unhappy citizens in the unnamed country in which the candy is banned. This cheers them up enough to entice them to join the protagonist in a revolution, mustering enough angry citizenry to overthrow the oppressive government.

 

This is the aim of the game, said National University of Singapore undergraduate Sharon Chu, who presented her team's game to reporters earlier on Tuesday... The game was made to show that games with serious-themes like say, 'political oppression', can be fun, said Ms Chu.

Chu left the issue of whether the repressive country in question was Singapore up to the "player's interpretation." GamePolitics readers may recall that Singapore's government banned Mass Effect for a time last year over a brief lesbian love scene.

Later this month, Copenhagen-based Serious Games Interactive will release Global Conflicts: Latin America.

The game, intended for students 13-19 years old, will be published in seven languages and is designed to teach students about political and human rights struggles in Latin America. From an SGI press release:

Many Latin American countries have dark histories of genocide, widespread corruption; and systematic exploitation of the indigenous population. The game lets you explore how these historical realities still cast long shadows on the everyday life of people in the region today.

In the game, students are challenged to assume the role of investigative reporters:

You arrive in Mexico at the US border with a bag full of journalistic ambitions. Latin America is one of the most turbulent, violent and poverty-stricken places on the planet. Yet it is only when Western interests in the region are threatened that we hear anything about the nations that struggle with paramilitary rule, extreme poverty and exploitation of the population.

 

In a region where politicians and police are feared rather than respected, people try desperately to grab a piece of the land and call it their own. All too often, however, it ends badly. Can you make a difference by writing investigative stories?

Global Conflicts: Latin America will be released for PC and Mac.

Earlier this year the BBC reported that the introduction of the highly aggressive American signal crayfish had essentially killed sport fishing in Scotland's Loch Ken.

With the region's traditional fishing tourism in steep decline, the economic health of towns around the Loch is in jeopardy.

By way of publicizing the crisis T-Enterprise has created Britain's Got Crabs, a Flash game which challenges "British Beavers" to shoot waves of the crayfish. It's not much of a game, but it does help to raise awareness of the ecologic crisis in the Loch.

GP: The game is embedded here, so if you'd like to try it just click Play...

Every gamer's favorite academic, MIT Professor Henry Jenkins, will be among the presenters at the 5th Annual Games for Change Festival which takes place June 2-4 in New York.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor will deliver the festival's closing keynote. Other speakers include Ben Sawyer of the Serious Games Initiative, Dr. James Paul Gee of Arizona State University, Prof. Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech and Heather Chaplin, co-author of Smartbomb.

From the GFC press release:

The only festival... will explore real-world impact, the latest games and funding strategies... Expert practitioners -- academics, activists, non-profits, funders -- will be called in to examine the impact of current games, evaluations planned and the ongoing work to build the field.

 

You will have a chance to see a variety of new games in development first-hand, and at the Games Expo sponsored by Microsoft, festival-goers can play the latest state-of-the-art games.