I'm here at the Games for Change 2009 Festival in New York. Today kicked off with a keynote by New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Nicholas Kristof. Below is my rough capture of the session; my goal wasn't to capture what Kristof said verbatim, but the sense of it, so please treat it as such.

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I'm really happy to be here. My kids were really impressed too. Meeting a warlord kind of impressed them, but not as much as meeting a group of game designers.

When Sheryl and I moved into the official NY Times apartment in China, we knew it was bugged, but the question was, where are the bugs. Someone had pointed to this grill high behind the wall.a We peered through and there did seem to be a bunch of gadgetry. I smashed down the grill and in the recess was a bunch of weird electronics. I had just spent a year studying Chinese and I was so happy to recognize it: Electronic Sound Carrying Device. So, having read enough Robert Ludlum, we discussed how to use them: leave them, smash them, or use them for disinformation. (Almost all the audience raise their hands for disinformation).

We'd just decided that too, when a friend came to the door, and we discovered what an Electronic Sound Carrying Device is: a doorbell. It was a good and humbling experience. It's important to acknowledge the complexity of what one tries to do.
Let me explain my interest in games. I spent a lot of my time trying to get Americans to care about issues that are a long way away and may not seem like they matter to them. One of the things I've come to conclude is that journalists are really bad t this kind of messaging. Any toothpaste manages to market its product with more sophistication than humanitarians trying to market a cause. So that drove me to research on how to connect people.

One of the lessons: we think we connect on an intellectual level, and we tend to make rational arguments. But in fact those arguments go right over us. We are wired not to care about large numbers because we were never surrounded by large numbers of people evolutionarily speaking. We all know at one level or another that one death is a tragedy and a million is sadistic, but there's been some research on how that kicks in.

A study: People were asked to donate to a 7 year old starving girl or a boy. The moment you ask to donate to the two of them together, the donations falls through. So empathy waned when the size of the group was greater than one. If you explained why one was hungry, then willingness to help waned too. There was another experiment in which people were asked to donate to a 180k fund for children's cancer. People were much more willing to donate when told they could "save one life" than if they could save eight.

If you ask people to engage in rationalism, they donate less. There seems to be a rational side of the brain and a more emotional one that relates to empathy. That's one area where games come in.

My own introduction to this world came from Darfur is Dying. I found it powerful because I was going out to Darfur, to get people energized, and it was very hard to do. It's very easy to tune out. Darfur is Dying immediately let you identify with a particular individual .

Another thing that struck me was the fact that those who should have acted, those in public office, were not acting, But unexpectedly, MTV and the folks working on this game were. That was a useful tool to connect emotionally with people.

Another area that games are good at: one of the problems with poverty and other issues is that they are complicated. There is a real risk of the humanitarian community overselling. You need nuance and complexity, but on the other hand that risks turning people off. But in a game, complexity can help.

More recently, Sheryl and I have been working ona book on women in th developing world (IB: the book is Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide , out in September). The project is twofold: the essential humantiarian problem for this cenutry is addressing gender inequity in the develoing world. Second: if you want to address broader humanitarian issues, the best way to do this is through gender equity.

We wanted to get the message out, but we wanted to reach beyond the choir. People who buy and read books already care about an issue. So we' e been working with a group on some documentary elements (on the theory that you can watch a TV documentary by mistake). That's where games came in. We thought about Darfur is dying, we thought a bout Food Force. WWe thought people could make an emotional connection and then become engaged in the issue.

It's been a great pleasure to work with Games for Change, eLine Ventures, Eric Zimmerman, and Dandelion on this game. It's essentially a free game that uses social networking, blurring boundaries between real and artificial reality. And I'm not ready to tell you any more quite yet. But it's been incredibly exciting to watch. This is a great way to get people aware of things that are very far away.

This is also part of a broader transition too. If you think about the Obama election, this was when we moved from a top-down to a bottom-up version of politics. We're beginning to see the same in international politics. Traditionally international politics was about listening to lectures. Now we have a much more bottom-up version of activism.

Here's a story about a women in Pakistan. In 2002 she was sentenced to be gang raped because of an offense her brother committed, and then she was supposed to commit suicide. She refused, and then used the compensation money ($8,700) to start a school in the village, because the way she thought to overcome these problems is to educate people. She began to get donations from Americans which she used very wisely. After she had $140k in donations, she had to go to Islamabad, and she took the overnight bus for $4 to save money so that everything would go to her school. She started a shelter, a TV program, a library. And this is all supported by people all around the country. We now have technological roots to provide these connections for a sort of do-it-yourself diplomacy.

There are a lot of obvious reasons why I hope you'll get involved in social impact games. For people suffering abroad, one of the biggest issues is if that topic is on the radar in Europe and America. That's the most obvious reason. But I also want to leave you with a couple more reasons you can benefit.

The truth is, we have a mixed record going out to change the world. But we have an almost perfect record of helping ourselves when we set out to help others. You may think that we know about happiness, but there's a lot of research that the things we think will make us happy won't. For example, studies show a sudden windfall may make you happy briefly, but it comes right down within a few months. Within a year of winning the lottery you're just as happy as you were before. Likewise, we tend to fear a really disabling accident or health emergency. But if one has such an accident, initially one becomes terribly unhappy, perhaps contemplating suicide. But within a couple months one is just about back where one ws before. Within a year it's indistinguishable. It's very hard to change our intrinsic happiness level.

But connecting to a cause larger than oneself does help. Traditionally that ws the role of religion, but it could also be the realm of social impact games. People may think it will be a sacrifice, but they end up finding it enriching.