Announcing the Games4Change Student Challenge!

We’ve always been pretty big fans of the Games For Change organization. We love their optimistic view of games. We are impressed by the way they bring people together who have a vision for the positive ways games can impact the future. And we love that they are investing in the future of games by working with students.

When we began talking about The Playability Initiative, we knew that Games For Change should be involved in some way. We also knew that we didn’t want to have a one-time impact on the way a single game was designed. We wanted to inspire accessible game design well into the future. And so, we’ve partnered with Games For Change to sponsor their Student Challenge with an accessible game design modifier.

Students in 8th – 12th grades who are entering the Games for Change Student Challenge can choose to make their entries accessible for a chance to win a design opportunity on our upcoming one-button game, Painted Waters. The winner will also receive accessible tech to help test their future game designs.

We’ve been busy this past week compiling student resources, thinking through some new curriculum ideas, and creating gamer personas for students to use in their game design. We are so excited to see what these students come up with, and we can’t wait to play their games as we judge their entries. We hope that some students may even pop into our Playability Initiative Facebook group to ask  our community members questions as they’re working on their games for the contest.

In the coming weeks, we’ll create some blogs that share with you some of our favorite accessible game design resources, because frankly, we were blown away by all the really great content that already exists for game designers of all ages and experience levels.

In the meantime, if you know any student in 8th -12th grade who would be interested in participating in this year’s student challenge, it’s even easier to participate online than ever!