Gaming for Public Media 2.0?

For anyone interested in interactive public media, the burgeoning world of DIY gaming is fascinating. At SXSW film festival, a user-generated gaming panel opened my eyes. How big is user-generated gaming? Well, people contribute 50,000 gaming applications to Facebook in one year, according to Gareth Davis, everything from puzzles to monster slaying. The newish website Congregate has 12,000 games on it, almost all of them made by a single person. With low-low costs, thin streams of revenue from ads, payments for game items and/or fees for games actually make profits. Boyd Multerer from Microsoft noted, "Right now we have really big blockbusters and tiny games. We need to get to the medium-sized indie." He also said, "It’s going to get easier and easier to make games, and the most important thing will be the story. If you want to know the future of games, look at the film side of this conference." Meanwhile, over at Spore, the make-your-own-world game invented by Will Wright, wizard of The Sims, they’re getting two million uploads a week of peculiar creatures, items and planet features—85 million of them and counting, from nearly three million registered viewers (with 3,500 new folks joining every day). I missed having a Games for Social Change person on these panels, to ask how public media 2.0 can use this enthusiasm.