Let's play games

From even before the ancient Egyptians gaming has always been a way to engage people and challenging them to find new solutions. Nowadays, millions of people commit billions of hours a year playing online games. They use their energy and time to solve quests, fight others and to win levels and gain strength, or points. However, these games are often self-centred and promote a culture of individual consumerism in a world with infinite resources, without a sustainable outlook.

We are asking the question if we can use this enormous commitment by gamers and the intense energy put into gaming to address issues of sustainability, creating a socially sensitive society.

Together with the Social Innovation Park in Bilbao, we want to explore this question in our first active learning seminar (12-13 July in Bilbao, Spain) under the Emergence by Design project to see how we can use ICT to steer society towards sustainability and sustainable innovation. For this reason we have invited a small number of experts from businesses, game designers, academia and civil society to actively look for ways to use online games for a sustainable society.

Read a paper on online gaming and indigenous culture promotion here. The authors, who lead the largest social enterprise in Alaska and one of the largest in the US, will attend the Bilbao seminar.