Heads up from Frank Lantz at Games for Change 2009 for some inspirational examples of games helping us understand social change. Check out the blog Overcoming Bias, by economist Robin Hanson; Intuition Games’ Gray game, which has players attempt to get players in a mob to switch sides; the phenomenon of “Kidney Chains,” where nonsimultaneous altruistic organ donations, if organized, can occur in optimally useful networks. Lantz talked about the practice of Min – Maxing in games, and the kidney chain is a game-like optimal solution to solving a social issue (there are 60,000 people waiting for kidney transplants at a given time). Finally he discussed optimal social solutions: complexity theorist Bruce Sawhill has noted, “You no longer want to find the best solution — you want to be living in a space of good solutions, so when the problem changes, you’re still there.”