Suzanne Seggerman
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Suzanne Seggerman is co-founder and president of Games for Change (G4C), a non-profit organization founded in 2004 focused on the use of video games for social change. G4C holds an annual festival every summer at Parsons The New School for Design and have a listserv and a website, and other programming related to social-issue game making. G4C is working with the MacArthur Foundation, Microsoft, mTV, and Participant Productions, and has regional groups in various cities in the U.S. and overseas. The premise behind G4C is that video games are a new and evolving cultural form and educational tool, and can and should be used to make games about important social issues.
Suzanne is also co-founder and co-director of PETLab (Prototyping, Evaluation, Teaching and Learning), a research lab based in New York City which is focused on the creation and assessment of games about social issues. PETLab is a collaboration between G4C and Parsons, and was funded in October 2007 by the MacArthur Foundation with a grant of $450,000. The initial grant was for creating curriculum for the creation and assessment of social issue games on Microsoft's XNA platform and mTV's Think portal, and to work with the New York Public Library and the Boys and Girls Club in making social-issue games.
Before founding Games for Change, Suzanne was a director at new media think tank Web Lab, where she worked since its inception, with its founder Marc Weiss. While at Web Lab, she co-curated the art exhibition "Provocations", featuring social-issue games by Natalie Jeremijenko, Natalie Bookchin, Michael Mateas, Brody Condon, Tamiko Thiel, and Anne-Marie-Schleiner.
Before joining Web Lab, Suzanne was a documentary filmmaker and producer, working on a number of PBS and independent films, including with as production manager on Steve Ives/ Ken Burns, "The West" and as co-producer on "Race for Life," a documentary and humanitarian aid about the environmental effects upon perinatal care in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
Suzanne lives in New York City with her daughter and husband, journalist and author, Michael R. Meyer, currently chief speechwriter for Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations.
[edit] References
- "Making Better World With Video Games" - Korea Times
- "Who Says Video Games Have to be Fun? The Rise of Serious Games" - Gamasutra
- "We Realized That Activism Has Evolved Beyond Sit-Ins" - The Globe and Mail
- "Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time" - The New York Times
- "Ethical computer games take on the shoot-'em-up classics" - The Daily Telegraph
- "Gaming The Poor" - Newsweek
- "Video Games Get Serious" - NY Sun
- "Can Social-Change Video Games Tackle Divorce, Poverty, Genocide?" - MTV News
