Unlimited Justice is worthy of a visit for a few reasons:

• It is a website dedicated to social good, recently in the news for its campaign against corporal punishment in public schools

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3ZsY8EWc_8&feature=player_embedded

• Unlimited Justice has taken a real-life problem and turned it into a game.  Each campaign is structured like a game.  Users (players) earn points for participating in some form of social activism like recruiting friends, creating discussion,  spreading the facts through Facebook or Twitter, connecting with government officials, and signing the pledge.

• Unlimited Justice is an example of how to get people, mainly children and teenagers, invested in issues by using digital tools.  It is a serious game, intended to enact real-world change at the highest levels of state government.

Imagine if missions and global issues in the church were addressed in the same way?  What do you think would happen?

I’ve written about different perspectives on video gaming and the teaching/learning process.  Hopefully you’ve had a chance to read about people like Jane McGonigal or Quest to Learn.  Maybe you’ve read a book by Marc Prensky or James Paul Gee.  These individuals and organizations posit that video games are powerful tools for learning and they have (according to Mary Ulicsak, a senior research from Futurelab) “the potential  to be an important teaching tool because they are interactive, engaging and immersive activities.”

The research behind this claim states that serious games, games with an educational purpose, intrinsically embed learning into the experience of play.  There are many examples of serious games in professional and academic environments.  The US Army invested $50 million in “games for training,” overseen by the Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation. Games like Wii Fit have or other health related games are examples of serious games in the health and medical field.  The Games Learning Society and the Consolarium are examples of organizations that create and research serious games for the field of education.

There are even educational journals that focus on serious games and their use in the teaching and learning process: the Online Games Study Journal, Games and Culture, the more recent International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (IJGCMS) and, from 2011, the International Journal of Game-based Learning.

Tom Chatfield in Fun Inc.: Why Games are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business writes, “There will inevitably come a time when no one alive remembers a time before video games existed. like books and movies, they will be a part of the media landscape older than living memory. Within a modern school, that time has already arrived: every single pupil was born into a world where video games were simply a fact of life, and it’s in this environment and among these pupils that the serious potential of video games suddenly starts to seem less a novel possibility than a creeping inevitability – as much a fixture in our future lives as the mobile telephone or the computer screen.”

Here are some things to consider in this basic introduction to serious games and the people/places you can dive into to get more information.

• Should we be using serious games for the purpose of spiritual formation?
• If a serious game came out for kids who just got baptized or made a decision to follow Christ, how would you decide whether or not to integrate it into your church programming?

Hopefully you’ve had the chance to read my first last two posts on serious games (Introducing Serious Games and Serious Games Defined).  It is possible for a game to have an educational purpose and these games are becoming more and more popular and embedded into the cultural landscape kids in our ministries are developing in.  You can read about extensions of serious games here.  Or you can dive into the 89 page research report on the topic by Futurelab here.

But why should we use games to teach?  Here is the rationale (taken directly from the Futurelab Report, p 14-15):

• Without claiming that every child is a gamer, or even interested in gaming, games are integral to many young people’s lives.
• There is a growing acceptance amongst teachers that games have educational potential and there is an increasing willingness to use games in their classroom.
• Games provide a platform for active learning, that is, they are learning by doing rather than listening or reading, they can be customized to the learner, they provide immediate feedback, allow active discovery and develop new kinds of comprehension. There is also evidence of a higher level of retention of material.
• Students are often motivated and engaged in games in a way that they are not with any other teaching method (bold mine).
• The technology upon which games are used and played is improving, for example there is more access to greater broadband speeds, improved graphics cards and storage space and a higher uptake of digital devices overall (ie – the digital divide is closing).

I am continuing the series of posts on kidmin and video games.  In my research, I came across Evoke.  According to Evoke’s blog, “Evoke is a ten-week crash course in changing the world. It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere.  The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.”

Evoke is the kind of thing children’s and family ministry leaders need to pay attention to!  Imagine if we could engage kids in virtual projects aimed at faith formation (serving, evangelism, discipleship, prayer).  Expect to see more and more games like Evoke in days to come.  If you are a gamer or know any programmers, DM me on Twitter!  I’d love to explore this idea!