Happs

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Happs: things happening in gaming cross-overs for activism, learning, science and more! 

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Gamers to Fight Tree Ailment: A new Facebook game called Fraxinus hopes to crowdsource the solution to protecting the common ash tree from a devastating fungus.

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Postcards from the edges: Through artwork, poetry, stories, collages or messages, we want people affected by disability to express what is important to them.

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"Contrary to popular board game lore, Monopoly was invented not by an unemployed man during the Great Depression but in 1903 by a feminist who lived in the Washington, D.C., area and wanted to teach about the evils of monopolization. Her name was Lizzie Magie. Seventeen years before women could vote, Ms. Magie, a fiery stenographer, poet, sometime actress and onetime employee of the United States Postal Service’s dead-letter office, ginned up a game that mirrored what she perceived to be the vast economic inequalities of her day. She called it the Landlord’s Game and saw it as an educational tool and gamy rebellion against the era’s corporate titans, John D. Rockefeller Sr., Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan."

Monopoly Goes Corporate: New York Times

Monopoly Empire: "With the Monopoly Empire game, you can own some of the biggest brands in the world! Every space on the board is an iconic brand, including Xbox, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Samsung!"

Layoff: "Tiltfactor’s Values at Play project releases Layoff,  a game used to study empathy, with the financial crisis as a background context." Description

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Featured Better Game Contest Winner! Hush
"Hush is a game set in 1994 Rwanda, during a Hutu raid on a Tutsi community. You play a mother who must calm her baby by singing a lullaby. You must type out the words of your lullaby calmly and evenly to keep your child from crying, maintaining your rhythm while you are bombarded by the increasingly disturbing sounds and images of the genocide just beyond your window. If you fail to keep your child from crying, you will be discovered and killed. If you can keep your child quiet, you can survive the violence and escape."
*link to download Hush*

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Barbez Mines Resistance And Tradition Of Italian Jews
by JOEL ROSE
September 14, 2013
http://www.npr.org/2013/09/14/222081021/barbez-mines-resistance-and-tradition-of-italian-jews

"The band also decided to record the unofficial anthem of the Italian Resistance, a song called "Bella Ciao."

"It's basically expressing a wish to fight for freedom — and a willingness to die if need be," Kaufman says. "So it's a very powerful song. And that's the spirit of the song: a willingness to pay the ultimate price, so that others can one day be free."

"Bella Ciao is also the name of Barbez's new album. The band members say it's intended as a rock record, not a history lesson. But if it prompts listeners to ask questions of their own, they say that would be fine, too."

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Bella Ciao from barbez on Vimeo.
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