Pick Me! HopeLab’s Hopeful SXSW Panels

August 17, 2011

It’s that time of year again, when tech types and social media mavens contribute to the grand crowd-sourcing exercise that is the South by Southwest Panel Picker. The PanelPicker allows those planning to attend the SXSW Interactive Festival to have a say in the curation of the conference content. PanelPicker votes constitute 30% of the decision-making process for SXSW, with 40% coming from an advisory board of industry professionals and the remaining 30% from the festival staff.

Here are three panels submitted by HopeLab and our spinoff social enterprise Zamzee. We’d love your support for these– just hit the thumbs-up button on the PanelPicker page (links below) to give them a vote. And please feel free to comment or ask questions!

Positively Inspired Change Campaigns

A proposed Core Conversation with HopeLab Manager of Emerging Media Tom Dawkins and Epic Change founder/CEO Stacey Monk.

Social change agents often use guilt, fear, pity, or outrage to rally an audience around a cause. But does tapping into negative emotions with the hope of creating positive change make sense?

Read the full description and vote here.

Stealth Health: Scaling Gamified Systems for Good

A presentation by HopeLab VP of Communications and Marketing Richard Tate.

What will it take to bring games for health to the masses? Academics, nonprofits and independent developers have spent years and millions proving the potential for games to engage consumers in their own healthcare. Still, few titles have reached the kind of scale that can move the needle on the world’s most challenging – and costly – health problems.

Read the full description and vote here.

Zamzee: Tech That Moves

A presentation by Zamzee CEO Jonathan Attwood.

Two converging megatrends just might offer a solution to a major social problem: Clearly, technology has kids’ attention. Could this be a solution to the obesity problem?

Read the full description and vote here.

Here is a selection of other panel proposals we like:

How Gaming Could Transform Your Organization

Maximizing Engagement With Gamification

Game Design for Social Change

Deviant Gamification: Rules Made to be Followed

Reaching Teens on the Digital Streets

Gaming in Assessments: It’s for the Kids Stupid

Motivating Employees: Gamification at Work

Marketing to Gen Y: Don’t

Got any recommendations in the areas of social change gaming, tween and youth communications and community-building we have missed? Please share them in the comments!

Image by Cle0patra on a Creative Commons license.

Tags:	call to action, Epic Change, hopelab, Jonathan Attwood, panel picker, Richard Tate, sxsw, sxswi, Tom Dawkins, voting
Posted In:	Conferences & Events

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Massively Multiplayer Offline Thumb-Wrestling and the Impact of Games

May 13, 2011

My colleagues Debbie, Austin, Brian and Mike demonstrating MMOTW.

This week I had the first opportunity to report back to my colleagues about my experience at the South by Southwest Interactive conference held in Austin in March. Looking back at it from a distance it’s interesting what sticks in my mind.

Working for HopeLab I am, naturally, games-focused, and much of what stays with me has a games dimension. In particular I’m still struck by Jane McGonigal’s presentation on her new book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Her talk explored the real-world impact games can have, something we are familiar with at HopeLab from our experience with the Re-Mission game. Games can change the way the participants feel, think and interact with the world around them, making them smarter, more confident and more resilient.

Although her talk was inspiring (read more about it here) it was not just her words that stick with me. As she began she announced that as her “talk was about games we’re going to play a game” and introduced us all to Massively Multiplayer Offline Thumb-Wrestling (MMOTW). This incredible game is like thumb-wrestling only, well, massively multiplayer.

In a ballroom of a couple of thousand people each person had to participate in two games, one with each hand, simultaneously. Each game had to have a minimum of three players but could go much larger, with battles of six, eight, ten or more hands. As we all formed these nodes the entire room became connected and at her command hundreds of furious thumb wars began.

I am pleased to report that I represented HopeLab well, managing to win battles with both hands.

After she congratulated us on our successes McGonigal asked us to sit down and revealed that she had really been doing some “crazy brain science on [us]”. When you hold someone’s hand for six seconds a chemical – oxytocin – is released that enhances the feelings of trust and connectedness between people. But how would you get a room of strangers to hold hands for six seconds? Awkward, right? A game however provides a comfortable excuse for us to touch and interact, literally changing on a chemical level how we were feeling about each other.

It was a fun and powerful demonstration of exactly what McGonigal would go on to talk about, how games alter us in ways both subtle and profound, and an incredibly memorable way to demonstrate rather than simply describe this effect.

At our staff meeting this week I ran a game of Massively Multiplayer Thumb Wrestling with everyone and appreciated again the laughter and sense of connection it generated. I highly recommend it for your next team meeting or family gathering!

Tags:	Jane McGonigal, Massively Multiplayer Offline Thumb-Wrestling, MMOTW, Reality is Broken, sxsw, sxswi
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