Media makers at Games for Change: Alan Gershenfeld
Video by Medicinal Media. Edited by Jae Shim.
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Medicinal Media will occasionally survey individuals who make media of all kinds about their relationship with art and technology — from early media in childhood to the media they create personally and professionally — and its impact. Alan Gershenfeld, co-founder/president of E-line Media, meets us at the 20th annual Games for Change fest to discuss how video games can be a change agent for mental health and many other existential threats to humanity.
E-Line is a developer of commercial social impact video games. Their titles include the BAFTA and Peabody award-winning Never Alone, Jackson Wild-winning Beyond Blue, Gamestar Mechanic, and MinecraftEdu. Alan has worked on impact game projects with the Gates Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, NSF, BBC, USAID, DARPA, White House OSTP, Cook Inlet Tribal Council, Google, MIT, ASU, and others.
Prior to E-Line, Alan was chairman of the nonprofit Games for Change and SVP Activision Studios, where he oversaw titles such as Civilization: Call to Power, Muppet Treasure Island, Spycraft, Pitfall, Zork, and Tony Hawk Skateboarding. Alan has published articles and books on technology, media, and social impact in Scientific American, Education Week, Edsurge, Huffington Post, Slate, Politico, Marketwatch, MIT Sloan Management Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Knowledge Quest. He is co-author of Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the 3rd Digital Revolution and a former film critic for the South China Morning Post.
Alan has been a featured speaker at conferences around the world, including SXSW, CES, E3, DICE, Games for Change, Learning & Society, Sundance Film Festival, Game Developers Conference, CTIA, Teach For America, National Writers Workshop, PC Forum, SoCap, Serious Play, ICE/Toronto, MIT Fab Lab Conference India and Peru, Milia/Cannes, Serious Games Korea, the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland and Dalian, China, and many others.
Alan is on the board of directors for the Impact Guild and advisory boards for FilmAid International, Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and Materiom. He has previously been on the advisory board of iCivics, PBS Next Generation Media, CPB Ready to Learn, and Creative Capital. He is also co-founder of Experimental Design, a leading world-building design agency, Endless Studios, a globally distributed youth-led game-making studio, State Department Arts Envoy, Founding Industry Fellow at the ASU Center for Games and Impact, and received the first Games for Change “Hall of Change” Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.
Alan Gershenfeld, keenly aware of the many existential threats we are currently facing, is nervously delighted to be advocating for and designing video games that can help change the world.
E-Line Media’s best-known game is Never Alone, based on a story passed down over thousands of years. The Cook Island Tribal Council partnered with E-Line and is now a majority investor.
Never Alone, also known as Kisima Inŋitchuŋa ("I am not alone"), is a puzzle-platform adventure video game developed by Upper One Games and published by E-Line Media
Never Alone uniquely introduced a compelling anthropological documentary to Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo consoles.
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