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Brainmesh is HiDef's weekly get-together in which our team discusses technological innovations and trends, relating them to how they impact great causes such as nonprofits and social enterprises.

In this installment of Brainmesh: Social Skiing, Upcoming Tablets, Social Music Listening, and Game Thinking!

Serious games are games which serve a purpose greater than raw entertainment. These are games which are not only fun to play but also help convey a message about our world, its problems, and possible solutions. Perhaps the term "games that are fun but support a great cause" is a better way to phrase it, though it gets a bit long. No matter what we call them, let's just call them important.

Cocos2D is an open-source framework for creating 2D games and interactive applications. I've made mention of it in two other posts, but this one serves an overall review. Written in Objective-C, Cocos2D combines:

Mobile gaming represents an important opportunity for new levels of engagement. Here at HiDef we're especially interested in Serious Games, those that seek to educate or inspire while achieving a completely entertaining experience. Cocos2D is one of the most popular open-source 2D game engines for the iPhone/iPod touch, if not the only solution currently available. In this tutorial I will walk you through the process of creating a simple touch-based side scrolling demo. This tutorial assumes that you have:

Over the years, mobile applications have become a way of connecting people to great causes, and with the introduction of the iPhone back in 2007, applications like Waze, AroundMe, and iTreadmill are great examples. We at HiDef believe that desktop gaming is just one way of contributing to great causes, and mobile is the next logical step.

Whether you have experienced them for fun, educational, or simulation purposes, games have probably made their way into your life one way or another, and at HiDef, we are finding that games can contribute to the great causes we are all about.