Tiltfactor’s Mary Flanagan will be speaking with several other internationally recognized social impact game makers on the panel, “Designing For Impact: Where the Talk Meets the Walk,” Montreal Games Summit, November 16-17, 2009. “As the medium of games matures and new experimentation and exploration of the medium flourish, many game designers, educators and activists of all stripes are turning to games to address key international issues such as poverty, global conflicts and climate change. Games such as Food Force from the UN’s World Food Program and Darfur Is Dying are being played by literally millions of players. Yet what exactly are the end results? Is it enough to simply track numbers of plays or players and declare the game a success? Or is the emerging field finally ready to start looking more seriously at how to design for concrete impact in the real world? What if the game began with a petition, a march or a dollar amount needed and designed back from that real-world outcome? How do we build this new step into a design process already very well established? This panel of leading game developers and educators will discuss how a new paradigm of game design is needed to take this emerging field from Talk to Walk. Featuring Tracy Fullerton, Chair of EA Innovation Lab at USC, Mary Flanagan of Tiltfactor Lab, Alexander Eberts, Co-founder and VP Products, Akoha, and Suzanne Seggerman (moderator) President and Co-founder of Games for Change.”