This year, a United Nations program devoted to urban planning in countries affected by poverty or natural disasters began developing a sports field in the slums of Kibera, Kenya, designing it in the popular sandbox video game Minecraft. The game, which allows players to build entire worlds out of cubes in a 3-D environment, helped the project leaders create a visual representation of the field that could be easily understood by the neighborhood’s residents.

“The game makes everything transparent,” said Pontus Westerberg, a digital projects officer at the program, UN-Habitat. “It gives the communities we work with more agency and helps everyone see what’s going on.”

The project, known as Block by Block, is among the highlights this week at the Games for Change Festival in New York, an annual event that promotes video games that seek social change. These efforts — known as serious games — once focused on education, to entice students to learn through digital play. But attention has shifted to more ambitious efforts like Block by Block, and a large part of that push has come from Games for Change, a nonprofit organization founded in 2004 that has worked with Google, NASA, the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation and TEDx.

Far removed from the military battles, zombie attacks and alien uprisings that dominate the multibillion-dollar video game industry, Games for Change is focused on lesser-known titles that treat the medium as something more than entertainment. The organization’s festival has become a platform to introduce video games with altruistic goals.