Our mission is to investigate, innovate, and cultivate game-infused solutions to society’s biggest challenges… with the goal of unleashing the unique potential of digital games to drive meaningful, sustainable learning, health and social impact.
The Center for Games and Impact (CGI) realizes this mission through partnerships among learning scientists, game developers and socially-responsible entrepreneurs to rigorously study and innovate around the full life cycle of impact games: research, design, develop, implement, market, distribute, assess and optimize. Through these partnerships, we will harness the power of games to create sustainable solutions for society’s biggest social, cultural, scientific, economic and educational challenges.
We, at CGI, continuously ask, How are games impacting our society? How do we inspire parents, teachers and players to take meaning from their gameplay and make this play relevant to their life? What are the deeper meanings behind games that keep people inspired to continue to play for hours and hours? What is there to learn from these experiences? How do we share these experiences with others? How can we use games within our daily lives to solve problems, bridge gaps in learning, promote pro-social behavior, heal and transform society?
The Center was launched by ASU Professors Sasha Barab (Executive Director) and James Gee in partnership with E-Line Founders Alan Gershenfeld and Michael Angst. Building upon the vision of ASU President Michael Crow for a New American University, the Center for Games and Impact (CGI) is committed to excellence, access and impact and research that contributes to the public good. More generally, ASU is a university with the potential to make a unique corporate/academic partnership realizable.