Various government agencies got together in October to discuss how games can be used to help solve problems within their respective departments.

More than 70 federal employees from 23 agencies held a confab at the White House in October to discuss projects they are working on to use games to address some of the nation’s top problems, according to a White House blog post by Constance Steinkuehler Squire, senior policy analyst with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

NASA, the Department of Energy, the Army, the National Park Service, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Arts were among the organizations who met to identify challenges that could derive solutions from game development, as well as how to figure out how to work across agencies to come up with game-oriented solutions to problems, she said.

While the primary application seems to be educational, gaming’s capacity to drive innovation in different technical arenas is also being seen as an incentive to embrace games. You can read more here.

– Filipe Salgado