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Suzanne Seggerman        

Writer & Global Advocate for Social Impact Games

Suzanne Seggerman is a writer and public speaker, with a long career working with multidisciplinary initiatives across a variety of media and platforms. Her first article, My Monster Tenant, was published in New York Magazine in November 2024.

Co-founder and former President of Games for Change (G4C), the leading global advocate for social impact games, Seggerman started the organization in 2004 with the belief that games can change the world — for the better. She led the organization for seven years, becoming the catalyzer and primary voice for a new movement. She has been a featured in national and international press and has given talks or keynotes at SXSW, Sundance, PopTech, TEDx and Harvard Human Rights.

Seggerman has served as an advisor, juror, and invited expert on a variety of social impact projects including, the National STEM Video Game Challenge, Microsoft's Imagine Cup, Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Knight Foundation's News Game Awards, Global Contents Forum Seoul, and others. She is the Co-founder of PETLab (Prototyping, Evaluating, Teaching, Learning), a public interest design and research lab for interactive media at the New School, launched with the support of mTV and the MacArthur Foundation.

Before G4C, Seggerman worked with Marc Weiss during the founding of POV Interactive, then Web Lab, and co-produced the first humanitarian aid/television event in post-Communist Czechoslovakia. She was Production Manager on the Stephen Ives/ Ken Burns' PBS series "The West." Before her film experiences, she conceived and produced one of the most successful volunteer Amnesty International events, "The Art of Free Expression," conjoining cultural events and human rights.

Speech Topics

Games Are Growing Up: Exploring the Emerging Role of Video Games As Meaningful Culture

Video games are a young medium, less than 40 years old. Some would say they are at a place much like film was in the 1960s - on the cusp of emerging as serious and sophisticated media capable of embodying more complex and meaningful content. Suzanne Seggerman, President and Co-founder of Games for Change, a nonprofit at the center of a new movement of games for positive social change, will discuss games in their evolving role in culture, highlighting indicators of their evolution such as museum collections and university study, and will go inside some of the latest "games for change" - games about poverty, climate change and global conflicts.

Games for A Civil Society: Learning Tricks & Technology from the Military for Public Interest Issues

The military has been using games and game technology for almost half a century - and in almost every aspect of their work, from suicide prevention to recruiting, Cyberwarfare to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The time has come for a new breed of video games: games for a civil society. How are nonprofits, artists and other activists using game technology to addressing the most pressing issues of the day: from poverty to climate change, global conflict to human rights. Suzanne will show games like Darfur Is Dying, a game about the conflict in Sudan which has been played by more than 3 million players and generated more than 50,000 actions including letters to congress, and Food Force, a game created by the UN's World Food Program which takes the player inside the life of a humanitarian struggling to feed the poor in sub-Saharan Africa.

Real World Games, Real World Impact: How Video Games Will Change The World

Suzanne Seggerman, President and Co-founder of Games for Change, will discuss the rise of a new genre of video games - deeply engaging games that embody real world issues such as poverty, climate change, human rights. She will go inside some of these new worlds and show how they might help move the dialogue forward on pressing global issues, and why these games might be our best hope for creating meaningful and lasting social change. She'll show games like Peacemaker, about the conflict in the Middle East; and A Force More Powerful, a training tool for resisting oppression created with the leaders of the Serbian Revolution. Suzanne believes the next "An Inconvenient Truth" will be a game - and she's going to show you why!

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