BS

There is a very interesting game I am sworn to secrecy on that I hope will be announced at or near the summit. To say a little more, I think it has the chance to help change the world as we know it.

I'm excited about some ideas we recently kicked around with the New York Fire Department which taught me how close we are to being able to take commercial games like Command & Conquer and mod them into useful game tools for various needs, be they public or corporate interest projects. There is an environmental detectives game, which is a PDA/Wi-Fi based application being developed at MIT.

As for offbeat, I'd say Catch-the-Sperm, which was done to promote AIDs awareness, was pretty offbeat when I first saw it. The VR Phobia center has modified Half-Life where you can go around and attack giant spiders and they use this to help people who have arachnophobia. When you hear about how phobias like this can truly create life problems for people, and how a game can change that, you realize offbeat to you and I is like a nail-on-the-head for someone else.

Let me finish with yet another story... Barry Joseph from Global Kids told me when he asked a bunch of kids to think of some serious games, one kid wanted to do a game about racial profiling at airports. That isn't offbeat but it definitely made me realize that the ideas people have can envelop so many diverse perspectives. In a time when people are concerned about the originality in games, maybe it will be serious projects that will give us games that strike new chords in our minds and hearts.