Annotated Peace Resource List

The Games For Change GaCha award for the best Awareness-Raising Game, 2007 "Best Social Awareness Game of 2007," Salon.com Adobe Youth Voices Project of Change, 2008 The game is designed in collaboration between Global Kids Playing 4 Keeps program's youth leaders at South Shore High School in Brooklyn, NY and the game design company GameLab. The context is Haiti, where the Guinard family tries to make ends meet and get ahead in their poverty-stricken homeland. In this sometimes tragic and always challenging simulation game, you help the parents, Jean and Marie, and their children, Patrick, Jacqueline, and Yves, make decisions about work, education, community building, personal purchases, and health care that might brighten their future. During the 2005-2006 school year, Global Kids Youth Leaders in the Playing for Keeps program at South Shore High School gained leadership, research, and game design skills while producing this socially conscious online game, Ayiti: The Cost of Life. The youth chose to design a game that focuses on the issue of poverty as an obstacle to education and uses the country of Haiti as a case study.

The game and its associated curriculum were initially released through UNICEF's Child Alert: Haiti website and TakingITGlobal's network of over 170,000 educators worldwide. In the year after it was released in October 2006, the game experienced a million plays.

Dale Le Fevre is a leading authority on New Games. In many of his workshops, traditionally adversarial groups have come together to play and have fun: Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East; Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; mixed races in South Africa; and Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Croatia and Serbia. This book includes the most popular New Games (including many recently found games) from more than 25 years of presenting.

A Gamefinder helps you select the ideal game for your situation, plus tips to help you lead the games. Stories of firsthand experiences show how New Games can have in building cooperation, teamwork, and common understanding.

Over 150 games that include skills to resolve conflict, enhance communication, build self-esteem, appreciate nature, and laugh together. The games are indexed according to age level, amount of activity, group size, and location.

Resources available by subject: Children, Conciliation, Immigration, Indigenous Issues, Peace, Racism....  Most available for the cost of shipping.

A tutorial demo and full demo are available free, though the game itself costs $19.95.  The game won the University of Southern California's "Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games" Contest (2006) and Games for Change "Best Transformation Game" (2007) and was a finalist in Ashoka's Changemakers International Contest: Entrepreneuring Peace (January 2007).  The game is set in Israel/Palestine, assumptions are stated on the website, and it is given a PG-13 rating.  

$10 From the site:  "People Power is more than a game. It’s an opportunity to join a community of others who want to learn about civil resistance and nonviolent strategies. Everyone can design scenarios and post them on the scenario page, available to the whole community. With this first edition, you are invited to participate in our 'Open Beta' phase of development. Play the game, then send us your comments, suggestions, and criticism. You will become part of the team, working to improve the game and make it more useful to more players. On our Forum, you can exchange ideas with other players and scenario writers."  I haven't bought the game or read reviews yet.

Designed for use with groups of children or adults, offering ways to hear values, demonstrate skills, and express oneself in safety.