Wii the People – Can games be a useful tool to engage the public in policy development?

Description
Nothing engages people like games - even in these serious economic times they continue to reach broader and broader audiences, just think of Grandma playing the wii over the holidays. The average game player is around 35 and is as often a female as a male. One of the most active areas of social networks is games. Yet nothing matters like policy. Serious Games are now a well-known phenomenon, using technology to train and connect people in fields like intelligence, the military, business and health. Despite the democratization of media being enabled by the Internet, forums still primarily attract policy wonks and can be too cluttered to be useful. Could games make policy development fun for non-wonks? Could games help us attract new participants to this important dialogue and provide the means for sorting through the results? Could play help us see solutions we've missed or gather data from simulated situations? If so, what are some examples of experiments from the past and what might future games look like and how might they work?

Speakers

 * Nathon Gunn - Fellow for the Study of Democracy at Queen's University, previously the head of Internet strategy for former Prime Minister of Canada Paul Martin, co-founding Director of the Board for Serious Games Canada, co-founder of Miramax New Media, co-creator of the History Canada Game, other credits include award-winning games played over 150-million times for folks like Disney and Family Channel. Currently preparing to launch “Social Game Universe” a tool to let people play social games with one another over various devices.

From Nathon

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General/from discussion

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