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GK Announces Winner of the AMD Playing For Peace Challenge on Gamestar Mechanic and Launches New Game Design Challenge on Media Influence
Global Kids Announces Winner of the AMD Playing For Peace Challenge on Gamestar Mechanic and Launches New Game Design Challenge on Media Influence
Global Kids's afterschool Playing For Keeps Program, funded by the AMD Foundation, has partnered with E-Line Media to co-produce their recurring social impact game design challenges. These challenges ask youth across American to use the GamestarMechanic web site to create and publish games addressing various social issues. This past March saw the launch of the first partnership between the Global Kids youth leaders and the staff at E-Line Media: The Playing For Peace Challenge, which asked youth to make games promoting peacing and ending war.
After reviewing over 1000 games, the winning entry, designed by username 1436891, is entitled Pointless War. This multilevel game puts the player in the middle of a brutal war and challenges them to get important world leaders past obstacles to arrive at a peace summit.
At the same time, the second AMD Social Impact Game Design Challenge has launched - Media and You - which asks youth to design a game in which the protagonist uses the positive power of the media to address or confront its negative effects.
To bring the point home, the youth worked with the game designers to create a new game sprite - an object that looks like a book, radio, television of computer screen which has the power to turn OTHER characters into something more positive or negative, depending on the intended impact of that form of media. For example, in the demonstration game created by the youth, the player has to turn off certain radios to save a zombie-filled town and turn on other radios to replace the evil music with an empowering one.
As with the first challenge, the youth chose the issue, researched the topic, co-designed the banner, the challenge copy, and developed the demonstration game.
In addition, the youth created the following video to promote the challenge, which ends June 8th.