Agenda

Special remarks delivered by Mr. Malcolm Johnson, Deputy Secretary-General, ITU

Previously, Alvaro worked at Eisko as Head of Marketing and Communications, at the crossroads between AI, Games and VFX, with a focus on Digital Humans.
 

Yu Matsui (groovesync, inc. / International Game Developers Association Japan) 

Kurt is the founder and CEO of Mokuni LLC. Mokuni is a New York based gaming company producing family friendly mobile games.  With over 12 years of experience in game design and interactive storytelling, Kurt has been constantly exploring the use of gamification for mental health.  His suicide prvention game “Jukai- Ocean of Trees” has recieved hornable mention from Global Game Jam 2016, and covered by Rolling Stone for its deep and meaningful narrative.  Kurt holds an MFA degree in Computer Art  from the School of Visual Arts, and he is a certified member of Mental Health First Aid, and a board advisor at Games for Change.

Video Games Without Borders (https://vgwb.org) is a nonprofit organization and an international community of people who believe in digital games to change the world for the better: that’s why we develop and distribute video games for social impact. The community is currently composed of more than 300 people from 30 different countries. Everybody helps on a voluntary basis, but once we get a project funded we contract a team of professionals, mainly from our own community, in order to secure both the quality and the schedule. In our community we have a large variety of profiles covering not only all game development roles (game design, programming, art, audio design, localization) but also providing experience in other fields (psychology, pedagogy, marketing, etc…). Since we don’t have permanent staff we

can easily scale and adapt our team to the project needs. 

Our most famous project is Antura and the Letters (https://antura.org), a literacy game for refugee children, in particular for Syrian displaced population, that aims to cover the lack of education structure and provide them with psychosocial support. Winner of the EduApp4Syria call for innovation, organized by the Norad in cooperation with several international partners, the game was independently evaluated by a large field test in Azraq refugee camp (Jordan). The result of the impact evaluation demonstrates a positive effect both on early grade reading in Arabic and on psychosocial well-being.

The game has been available for free on the mobile stores since 2017 and has already reached 300.000 downloads, with very positive feedback from the players (4.6 out of 5 stars on Google Play). Moreover, Antura and the Letters received several international awards and nominations. The project is fully open source and is currently adapted in other languages by different international teams and even used to help children learn foreign languages, with the ultimate goal to offer free literacy in their mother language to all kids, investing less than 1€ per child!

More recently we decided to bring our contribution in the COVID-19 emergency and we developed an original game in only one month and a half and with no budget, just relying on voluntary contributions from our community. The game is called Flatten Island (https://flattenisland.org) and it's about managing a pandemic, so that anybody can prove what they learned in the latest weeks. It can be played in 19 languages on Android or directly on the web from any device. Again, the game is 100% free but we ask for donations for NGOs and institutions fighting against COVID-19.

#WeBelieveInGames