Becker School conference unlocks the potential of ‘serious’ games
It was all good.
The Becker School of Design & Technology recently hosted the Games for Good Conference, showcasing advancements in “serious” game storytelling and technologies that promote positive social impact and change.
The two-day conference “brought together campus educators, students, designers, researchers, and community partners from across the globe to explore how games can inform, inspire, and improve the world,” said BSDT Dean Paul Cotnoir. The conference drew more than 350 attendees and featured over 80 presentations in the form of panel discussions, “lightning talks,” and game demos held in the Center for Media Arts, Computing, and Design.
Other highlights of the conference included important discussions about topics such as fostering climate awareness in multiplayer gaming, designing for diversity, the creation of games for children with autism, how to decolonize the creation of interactive preservation multimedia, as well as a retrospective of the BSDT’s collaboration with the White Snake Projects, a Boston-based activist opera company.
“This inaugural annual conference goes a long way to help establish Clark University as a thought leader and trendsetter in the field of serious games and games for good,” says Cotnoir. “The proceedings of the conference will soon be published in the prestigious Journal of Games, Self and Society (Play Story Press), which will be archived in the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at the Strong National Museum of Play.”
The event was launched with a keynote address by Susan Rivers, co-lead and chief scientist at iThrive Games and the History Co:Lab. Session participants dealt with topics like the therapeutic benefits of interactive multisensory artwork, how games can unlock self-expression and skill-building in neurodiverse youth, the effective use of video games in health and education, and the joys and challenges of owning a media company.
Plenary speaker Stanley Pierre-Louis ’92, president and CEO of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), told a Tilton Hall audience that video games are a $184 billion global industry that is outpacing music and film in revenues and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, both directly and in supporting roles. More than 3 billion people worldwide play video games across a wide demographic swath, Pierre-Louis said, noting that game-playing fosters social connections, inspires creativity, relieves stress, and, especially in the realm of serious games, promotes empathetic thought and action.
The industry is still figuring out how it will be most relevant in a post-COVID world, Pierre-Louis said, both in the types of games that will be produced and the jobs that will need to be filled. He added that ESA is advocating with individual states to provide tax incentives for video game development, similar to the incentives they offer to film companies to shoot movies within their borders.
“We argue that when you do it for film and TV, you’ve got a ‘village’ for about two months,” he said. “But help build a new tax base; we build something permanent.”
In addition to tax incentives, Pierre-Louis listed public-policy priorities his organization is pursuing, including digital wellness, First Amendment/freedom of expression issues, opportunities involving artificial intelligence, and challenges around intellectual property, tariffs, and cybersecurity, among others.
Among the sessions was one spanning continents and cultures. Participating via Zoom were administrators from Cherkasy State Business College in Ukraine, Svitlana Ustychenko, director of the college’s language center, who visited Clark in 2023, and Iryna Ivanova, associate professor of the Department of Design and Socio-cultural Disciplines.
They joined hosts Cotnoir and Becker Professor Minka Stoyanova to discuss a unique partnership between the two institutions.
In the fall of 2024, Cherkasy and Becker collaborated on the Resistance Games course, which involved students and faculty in both countries exploring digital pathways to intercultural understanding through game design, critical media studies, and language learning. Together through gaming, the two sets of students developed narratives that explored topics of global resonance and local nuance, such as online bullying and how people respond to a diagnosis of autism, while heightening their communication skills and elevating their awareness of unfamiliar social constructs.
There were tangible challenges. Participants at Cherkasy operated in crisis conditions across platforms like Moodle and Discord, with rolling blackouts perpetually threatening to disrupt classes (as well as Zoom transmissions). Ultimately, Cotnoir said, the collaboration fostered “intercultural empathy and linguistic growth” through play.
Ivanova reported that the Ukrainian students have since presented their work at several conferences. “This course went deep into their heart and soul,” she said.
The Resistance Games course will be offered again this spring.
Continue scrolling to view photos from the conference weekend.
Photos by Erika Sidor, Nathan Fiske, and Ismael De La Cruz ’27
