Instead of just blowing away aliens and jacking cars, can video gamers also learn to make the world a better place? A Dartmouth College professor says they can.

Mary Flanagan, who just moved from New York to become professor of film and media studies at the Hanover college, designs "social activist" electronic games and studies the potential for video games to include humanistic values and promote positive social change.

Flanagan's thinking on values goes beyond the perennial debate on whether violent video games are destructive to society.

"Those are pretty surface-level questions," she said.

Regardless of whether they involve shooting and bloodshed, she said, all games have inherent values. Designers should consider the kinds of values their games reward, she said. "You can change something about a design and actually change a value."

For example, in the popular World of Warcraft, which pits the Alliance against the Horde, the two groups of combatants have no way to talk to each other. "You've already cut communication between these two groups," Flanagan said, so they have no choice but to fight.

A better game might include "sharing paradigms," she said, in which outcomes are negotiated.

In 2006, Flanagan created a sculptural installation called Giant Joystick, a 10-foot-tall functional video game controller closely resembling the Atari 2600 joystick of the 1980s. In exhibition spaces, the joystick controls old Atari arcade games like Asteroids, which are projected on a big screen. To play a game, people have to work together. It takes at least one person to move the stick and another to press the enormous red "fire" button. Giant Joystick has been exhibited at art galleries in London, Spain, Los Angeles and San Diego.

She also sees vast potential in electronic games for education. "Game makers are problem makers and problem solvers," she said. "When you make a game about something, you really do understand it."

At her video game research and production project, Tiltfactor Laboratories (tiltfactor.org), Flanagan and her colleagues have designed three educational games that are available free online.

In Profit Seed, a game created in Macromedia Flash, players direct gusts of wind to blow seeds onto farmers' fields. Moving from level to level, players learn about issues surrounding genetically modified crops.

The Adventures of Josie True is a web-based Flash game aimed at middle school girls. Players follow the title character through a story containing several mini games that teach math and science concepts. The stories are based on the lives of historical women, such as Bessie Coleman, the first female American aviator.

Rapunsel is a 3D dance game that teaches computer programming to 10- to 12-year-old girls. To make a character in the game perform dance moves, players first have to program the moves by writing simple code. Rapunsel is meant to draw girls into video game design. "They haven't historically been the audience or the makers of games," she said.

Flanagan said she thinks everyone has a lot to gain by not only being consumers of video games, but also by learning to make them. "It changes your relationship to the technology," she said.

She said she's excited to start collaborating with people at Dartmouth and elsewhere in the Upper Valley, where she has been delighted to find a lot of interesting and eclectic talent. "I'm sure that there are people already doing all kinds of projects that are related," she said.

She's looking out for anyone who would like to become involved with the Tiltfactor Laboratory at its new home.

"It would be great to build a critical mass within the college and the community," she said.