/ Cory Doctorow / 11:33 am Tue May 10, 2011

GameSave: hackathon to design emergency-relief games

A group of disaster relief specialists and game designers have created GameSave, a hackathon in Seattle to design games to teach people the fundamentals of emergency relief:
GameSave is a hack-a-thon style event which takes place over the course of 5 weeks, during which multiple teams of game developers and emergency relief professionals will each create a complete game concept and working demo aimed at an aspect of disaster relief. Teams can be assembled in several ways. A team can be composed of independent individuals who organize themselves initially through our registration site and wiki. Teams can also be sponsored as a unit by their respective employers.

There will be an organization and planning period where team members will be expected to communicate with one another via the wiki and by whatever other methods they so choose.

Ideally, teams will meet for a intensive hack-a-thon session in Seattle, Washington where they will meet with disaster relief personnel for vital information, as well has have sequestered time for the bulk of the build. When the hack-a-thon is up, teams will return to their homes and continue to collaborate and polish their concept for submission. Participation is possible even if travel is not, because all location-specific happenings and presentations will be livestreamed.

Additionally, travel scholarships will become increasingly available to qualified participants as sponsorship allows.

Each concept/demo will be judged by a panel of experts in the fields of game design and emergency management.

Platform to Playform: A Game Layer over Digital Activism (Thanks, Jake!)

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  1. My initial thought on reading the title was that this would be about designing games that could be quickly cheaply and easily distributed to people who are experiencing an emergency. Like people who find themselves in a shelter waiting to see to what extent the suddenly alarmingly high sea is going to ruin their home. Then I thought that would be a weird thing to have a hackathon about. Then I thought, but why not? I bet people in such a situation might like some games to help pass the time but they quite possibly didn’t think to pack the Monopoly and Scrabble as they were fleeing the on coming disaster. Maybe someone should look in to that.

  2. Could this same concept not be applied to network gaming machines together, and then pool data from on-board sensors (such as the kinect) to create an ad-hoc earthquake early warning system?

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