found thinktank interest in game design breaking poverty
There was an interesting think-tank I came across called project horseshoe. This thinktank has the subtitle of solving game design’s toughest issues but I seem to look at it as solving tough issues through game design, with some reports that stuck out to me such as prosocial economics for game design and cosy games.
The reason I find these posts interesting and exciting is because they were putting down in writing something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and that’s using videogames as a tool to educate topics of fundamental and cultural significance. And by that, I hover around the topics of poverty alleviation and personal responsibility.
I’ve written about poverty before, and I’ve also lived through it, and I think the only reason I could get out of the pit of poverty is due to some fundamental stories and patterns that I was (unbeknownst) trained in, which helped me to use the tools availble for me to get out.
I think there is a great number of tools that are out there to help people, but people need understanding of how to use the tools, as well as the psychological saftey to learn and approach them. I’ve attempted to make and experiment with these tools (such as the CL-AIR system.
It is worthwhile to consider how large and broadreaching videogames are. Every second person I know has some experience with playing videogames, and the indie market is more accessible to a broader number of people compared to movies (and perhaps books). People play to relax, to learn, to waste time, to get dopamine, and more.
The synoposis then, is to make games that people can play, that teach those fundamental stories and patterns so that people can learn how to get out of poverty, using the tools that are available to them at any given time.
For my first experiment of this, I would dabble in the idea of cozy games, being that a place where there is psychological safety. Hopefully if the game is entertaining enough, then they want to revisit the game, where it teaches some methods of mindfulness, incremental success, having a north star, etc.
What should happen first, however, is a clearer deliniation of what those stories and patterns are. So that’s where I’m at in this project discovery phase.