Games for Change Awards Finalists: Neurodivergence, Math, Language and More!

For nearly two decades, the Games for Change Festival has been a destination for developers, educators, researchers, students, and other game-changers who want to make an impact through video games or immersive media.  Endless partners with G4C to create design challenges for developers to explore big questions and create games around social impact themes.

This year, from July 13 – 14,  the Festival will be live in person in NYC featuring two days of curated talks, panels, and arcades with built-in networking opportunities throughout. Then, from July 15 – 16, the Festival will transition to an exclusively online program for another two days of fresh content and talks to stream. 

The annual Games for Change Awards celebrates the year's best games and XR experiences that tackle social impact causes and make a difference. This year’s awards are the most competitive and global in the Festival’s history – with over 400 submissions across nine categories. A group of 125 game developers, researchers, and experts in game design reviewed the games and selected the finalists. Game entries came from established AAA studios, indie developers, and university-level students. 

With 35 Finalists across eight categories, all the games are creative, engaging, and beautifully designed across a multitude of themes. Here at Endless, we believe games are an excellent vehicle for learning, so we were particularly interested to check out the finalists for the “Best Learning Game” category:

“Ava” by Social Cipher

Ava: Social Cipher’s role-playing platform adventure follows an autistic star mapper as she works through social challenges with space pirates, battles self-doubt, and finds community. Co-developed with the autistic community, Ava’s adventures provide youth of all neurotypes a judgment-free space to try out social situations and emotional responses. 

Lingo Legend: Developed by language acquisition experts, Lingo Legend combines language with gaming to make it a lot more fun. With over 150 categories of vocabulary, grammar, and common phrases to learn from, the game takes inspiration from the games we love to play while creating novel learning experiences that are truly engaging.

“Culture Overload”

Culture Overload: Created for the Gaming Against Violence program, which focuses on teen dating violence prevention, this prosocial video game explores media and cultural impacts on the attitudes and beliefs that young people have regarding healthy dating relationships.

Math Makers: This math game by Ululab doesn't feel like math. The player controls wacky animals who make their way through physics-based puzzles, each of which contains a math lesson hidden in the gameplay. They’ll encounter strange and wonderful creatures, collect pets, and learn math without feeling like they’re studying in school. Math Makers uses gaming to change children’s intuitions about difficult concepts like place value, fractions, addition, subtraction, equality, and so much more.

The winners will be announced on July 15 at 7:00 PM EST at the G4C Festival. Interested in attending? Use our code G4C22END for 15% off.