In New York, experts wonder how games can help save the world

A video game that teaches breathing for managing anxiety, a board game about prepping for a climate crisis in your town, 666 buckets of real maggots from Diablo IV, and more.

Games for Change 2024’s keynote. Photo: G4C

The Games For Change festival, now in its 21st year, is not an E3, where the project is to hype video games, and everyone there knows how that mission is done.

Nor is it the Game Developers Conference, where the essential process of making video games is discussed and dissected.

It’s a gathering built around a maybe and a what-if.

It’s a two-day event, held this year at Parsons School of Design | The New School in lower Manhattan, around the feel-good notion that video games can maybe…probably…hopefully have positive impacts on our lives, our society and on the planet.

I spent all of my Thursday at the festival, amid hundreds of developers, activists, aid groups and representatives from reputation-conscious mega-corps.

Let me take you through it, because it made for a fascinating day in NYC…