Portland Games for Change is going as a group. If we gather more than 25, we can get a group discount rate of $12 instead of $15. Please let me know if you would like a group ticket on the facebook event page.

Direct Event Link: http://www.cu-portland.edu/jane/

Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world renowned designer of alternative reality games — or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She has created and deployed award-winning games in more than 30 countries on six continents, for partners such as the American Heart Association, the International Olympics Committee, the World Bank Institute, and the New York Public Library. She specializes in games that challenge players to tackle real world problems, such as poverty, hunger and education. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How they Can Change the World. She directs gaming R & D at the Institute for the Future, the nonprofit firm where she developed Superstruct, a massive multi-player game in which players organize society to solve issues that will confront the world in 2019.

Social capital is a key concept for thinking community enrichment, resource building and the social structure of networks.

How does this concept work in games and 3D spaces? What happens to social capital when communities move into persistent digital worlds? Does digitizing social capital fundamentally transform our sense of place and connectivity?

Join us as University of Oregon professor Donna Davis shares insights of a multiyear ethnographic study of digital social capital in 3D online spaces.

She will also discuss her current research, joined by Barbie Alchemi, founder of Creations for Parkinson’s, Second Life’s Parkinson’s support group dedicated to working with people with Parkinson's while raising money and awareness of the disease and for the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

Location: Take elevator to 3R, Turnbull Center's Pape Forum

Please no food or drink in the meeting rooms.

When we think of games - video games, board games, any kind of games - they are often trivialized as mere childish pastimes to entertain us. Yet games are and have always been so much more than that. From the Olympics to epic man-vs-machine chess matches to daily “games” in which an underdog rises above and beats the system, games are powerful artifacts of our everyday lives with a potential for creative expressivity and change beyond that for which we give them credit. In this talk, game designer and artist Brenda Romero talks about the expressive power of games and her current work in the award-winning Mechanic is the Message series.

Following the talk, Portland Indie Game Squad will introduce the exciting work happening in Portland and lead a discussion for generating ideas and making connections in the local game development community.

Brenda Romero is an award-winning game designer, artist, writer and creative director who entered the video game industry in 1981 at the age of 15. She is the longest continuously serving woman in the video game industry. Brenda worked with a variety of digital game companies as a game designer or creative director, including Atari, Sir-tech Software, Electronic Arts and numerous companies in the social and mobile space. She is presently the game designer in residence at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the co-founder and chief operating officer of Loot Drop, a social and mobile game company. In recent years, Brenda has become known for an award-winning series of non-digital games titled The Mechanic is the Message. So far, Train, Siochan Leat, the New World and Pre-Conception have been released. In 2009, her game Train won the coveted Vanguard Award at IndieCade for "pushing the boundaries of game design and showing us what games can do."

A collaboration among: Portland State University Pixel Arts Game Education Portland Indie Game Squad

This event is free and open to all.