The U.S. government has had a tense relationship with video games since at least the debate about violence in gaming in the early 1990s, but Mark DeLoura, former Senior Advisor for Digital Media for the White House, says that relationship has changed in recent years, and now the government is more concerned with the good things video games can accomplish rather than some of the controversies that surround them.

“My takeaway after having been in the White House is there’s an interest in seeing if games can be used to address societal challenges,” DeLoura told GamesIndustry.biz. “That’s the primary interest in games – we’ve seen other modalities in other media have an impact in different ways over time as we learn how to use them to teach people or express concepts. Can games do that? If they’re not doing that how do we get them to do that? If they’re doing it a little, do they want to do it more? How can we encourage this? That’s the interest.”

DeLoura explained that during the recent ebola scare, the White House aided an “ebola hack-a-thon” in Seattle by connecting the game developers participating in the event with people involved in the creation of ebola treatment centers.

He noted that stories like this were common, but he said, “In general, great feel good stories don’t get huge press anyway. That’s the challenge, as games are doing more and more great things.”

DeLoura also said that the White House also wanted to encourage greater diversity within the video game industry, as it did with other technology businesses.

“So from the federal level, when you talk about what can you do, you can see there’s a bunch of interesting places where you can plug in and you don’t want to regulate things but you want to encourage things,” DeLoura said. “So there’s tons of different non-profits popping up around trying to encourage girls to get into tech or to try and fix the problems in the work environment, so that’s one of the things we did a lot at the White House was to try to encourage those things and really lift them up and shine a spotlight on them so they get more support.”

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