Gameful gets public funding of $64,965 on Kickstarter.com!

Jane McGonigal's new project Gameful managed to raise a whopping $65K on Kickstarter.  Described as...

"an online Secret HQ where you can connect with other people who believe in the power of games to make us better and change the world.  It will be a free resource -- a place for you to:

- Set up a profile sharing your expertise, skills, abilities, and interests
- Search the network for collaborators and talent
- Spread the word about your new projects
- Meet journalists who want to write about interesting games or research like yours
- Find new and cutting-edge game projects to inspire you
- Join a Gameful book club and discuss big ideas
- Join a Gameful game club and play big ideas!
- Brainstorm and submit conference panels or sessions together
- Plan Gameful meet-ups at conferences and festivals
- Nominate your own work, or work you love, for the annual Gameful Awards (in the categories of Reality-Changing, Life-Changing, and World-Changing)"

We're very excited to see where she takes this and whether it becomes a useful community platform for the industry.

Redefining Social 'Awareness' - UNWFP example

The emerging world of embedded sensor networks presents a huge opportunity for Games for Change.  With sensors we can gather real-time information from the field and use it to give users real-time reporting on the progress of our projects.  Here's an exciting example we started to explore this past summer…

The U.N. World Food Program (UNWFP) is one of the largest NGOs in the world, dedicated to making sure that the world's 3 billion people living without basic food, water, and medical treatment are given a chance to survive.  With a vast infrastructure of global depots and offices, the WFP employs cargo planes, helicopters, ships, trucks, and in-the-field operatives to move their supplies around the globe and reach those in need.  They also take on several natural disaster/crisis situations a year such as tsunamis and earthquakes.

As we discussed how we might assist them, we explored the creation of a video game that would pull real-time data from sensors embedded in their infrastructure (webcams mounted to their planes and ships, twitter feeds from their helicopter pilots flying into crisis zones, gps and RFID tags embedded in pallates of food in transport) and layer that real-time data on top of a battleship-like video game, giving it a layer of real-time integrated rich media - the ultimate experience.

We're continuing to explore ideas like these with forward-thinking partners looking to connect the public to their projects.