Asteroids, Pac Man, and Tetris have come a long way. Video games – generally thought by many to be only about fun – have grown up and become serious.At least that was the message at the Games for Change conference, co-sponsored by Parsons The New School for Design.

One way in which the genre is becoming more serious is with nonviolent strategy games, such as “A Force More Powerful,” which was made with input from Serbian resistance leaders who helped overthrow Milosevic. Then there’s “Darfur is Dying,” which simulates the experience of being among the 2.5 million refugees fighting to survive. Pax Warrior places the game player in the shoes of a U. N. commander attempting to maintain peace in Rwanda. PeaceMaker, a simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has the player react to military attacks and diplomatic negotiations – all from the comfort of one’s sofa.

These games have “real-world content,” the conference co-director Suzanne Seggerman said in describing the games displayed and discussed over the two-day parley. “We’d like to make a difference in the world.”

With gaming revenues robust, serious gamers hope to reach wide audiences. “We have a great opportunity to harness this new medium to address the most pressing issues of our day,” she noted.

“This is a new field,” the conference co-director Benjamin Stokes said. “And there are a lot of questions.”

He spoke about getting past whether video games are good or bad during a discussion of best practices about games. “How do we evaluate games?” he asked.

David Rejeski of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars discussed his idea for a Corporation for Public Gaming, which would be akin to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Mr. Rejeski said he grew up with television and that debates about the social impact of this earlier medium were strikingly similar to the discourse surrounding video games: Were they a bad influence on children – or worse, addictive? In the end, though, he said, there was the near total penetration of television technology into people’s homes.

The author of “Everything Bad is Good For You,” Steven Johnson, said there has been an increase in cognitive complexity and challenge in games: It was “not as good as reading ‘Middlemarch.’ but the games were better than in 1977.” He went through several objections he has encountered when speaking about his book. Chiefly, if games are making us smarter, why everyone is so stupid? He said the skills that games are teaching are not ones we have tools to measure. One skill, for example, is “distributed collaboration,” or building worlds together.

Mr. Johnson said another objection he hears is about Grand Theft Auto, a violent game involving carjacking. His response is that this is the least violent generation of youth since the ’50s. When asked, don’t video games can cause aggression? He said: so can high school football. To the question of whether video games influenced the youths who killed at Columbine, his answer was that Mark Chapman, who killed singer John Lennon, read J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” And David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz was supposedly influenced by the dog next door. Mr. Johnson said a more difficult objection was: “Okay, maybe they’re getting better at problem solving, but they have no imagination.”

Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ian Bogost said video games were a means of expression akin to literature art and film, and one can subject them to the same kind of criticism as those other fields.He questioned the use of the term “social change” and said terms raised earlier in the conference such as “access,” “opportunity,” and “fairness” mean different things to different people. He said to a conservatives, fairness can mean keeping the money you earned, while to a liberal, it may mean wealth distribution.

Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation raised the question of whether or not children who use digital media are learning differently. Other areas of interest include examining the civic engagement of children actually engaged in games.

Attending was Chaya Harash, who designed a video game to help children with separated or divorced parents, and the political theorist Jacqueline Stevens, whose project at www.agoraxchange.net is “the new media version of Thomas More’s Utopia.”

gshapiro@nysun.com