Asi Burak, the president of Games for Change, in Manhattan. His nonprofit group supports video games with social agendas.
This year, a United Nations program devoted to urban planning in countries affected by poverty or natural disas-ters began developing a sports field in the slums of Kibera, Kenya, designing it in the popular sandbox video game Minecraft. The game, which allows players to build entire worlds out of cubes in a 3-D environment, helped the project leaders create a visual representation of the field that could be easily understood by the neighborhood’s residents.
“The game makes everything transparent,” said Pontus Westerberg, a digital projects officer at the program, UN-Habitat. “It gives the communities we work with more agency and helps everyone see what’s going on.”