My recent post on Games for Change seemed to be pretty popular, so I thought many of you would be interested to learn of Jane McGonigal's (and co-founders Nathan Verrill, Matthew Jensen, and Kiyash Monsef) new venture: Gameful.

Gameful is set to launch at the end of October and will be a "secret HQ" for people who are making games that are making people:

- happier
- smarter
- stronger
- healthier
- more collaborative
- more creative
- better connected to our friends and family
- and better at whatever we love to do when we’re not playing games

The intention of Gameful is to connect people who are:

passionate about positive impact games and looking for potential collaborators; launching a start-up, and looking for employees or co-founders; seeking advice or mentors; looking for co-authors for papers, or co-panelists for conferences; [in] need [of] someone they can interview for a book, or a news, magazine, TV or radio story; and most importantly, looking for a world-changing game they can play TODAY.

...and, to make it easy for those people to get what they need to develop new "reality-changing, life-changing, or world-changing" games, such as by helping them find:

- collaborators
- ideas
- funding
- partners
- mentors
- allies
- playtesters
- publicity
- and gamers

The idea for Gameful was triggered by the all the emails McGonigal received after her TED talk February (see below), in which she explains how games can make a better world:

This past weekend McGonigal, Verrill, Jensen and Monsef put Gameful up on Kickstarter to raise funds to cover the operating costs of the new website. Looking at the pledged funds today, it looks like the project is a 'go' and we can look forward to seeing Gameful up and running in October.

If you'd like to receive email updates about the launch, you can sign-up at http://gameful.org/.

For more information about Gameful see the project's Kickstarter page or Jane's blog.