Game Developers Conference 2008 - (Page 49) Serious Games Summit MonDAY & tuesDAY The Serious Games Summit GDC spotlights the rapidly growing serious games industry that features the use of interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors. The summit provides a forum for game developers and industry professionals to examine the future course of serious games development in areas such as education, government, health, military, science, corporate training, first responders, and social change. 9am-6pm • room 135, north Hall Serious Games Summit ADVisors ben sawyer DigitALMiLL, inc. MonDAY, FebruArY 18 serious games taxonomy ben sawyer (Digitalmill), peter smith (university of central Florida) 9-9:50am The serious games space has come a long way in the past five plus years. With a variety of projects now being completed or in various stages of development, it’s time to re-examine the space with an eye of providing a stronger definition of the entire field of serious games, including providing some much needed categorization and specific labeling within the large gamut of activity. For the past year Ben Sawyer, co-founder of the Serious Games Initiative, and Peter Smith from University of Central Florida have been assembling a proposed taxonomy of serious games. This taxonomy provides multiple views of the activity within the serious games space and looks at the greater issues of how serious games relates to generalized simulation and modeling as well as the commercial entertainment field. In this presentation, Sawyer and Smith will present a complete overview of their Serious Games Taxonomy 1.0, providing not only a stronger definition of the serious games field, but also presenting a platform upon which to drive further activity and understanding of serious games, including market opportunities, research requirements, advocacy, criticism, and more. Feedback from the audience will be used to drive refinements to the work prior to publishing it formally. GamEstar mEchanic: Learning through game Design Katie salen (parsons school of Design), greg trefry (gamelab) 10-10:30am This session takes on serious games from the perspective of thinking, creating, and learning through making games. gamEstar mEchanic, a commercial online game produced in a unique collaboration between Gamelab and the GAPPs group at University of Wisconsin at Madison, is designed to teach players the fundamentals of game design. Designed to teach young people how to design games by giving them the tools and learning space in which to do it quickly, collaboratively, and easily, gamEstar proposes a model for learning that extends traditional notions around gamebased learning. In gamEstar players are invited into a narrative world situated within a social network to design, trade, and modify their own small, web-based games. In building games in this environment it is hoped that students not only learn about game design but about how to essentially build literacy about the systems and/or content that their games are based upon. This session will demo the game and discuss strategies for assessment of the design-based skills that emerge from game-play, offering models for understanding what and how players are learning. Ben is the producer of Virtual U, a million dollar plus foundation funded project to build a university management simulator. VIRTUAL U, now shipping Version 2.1, was a 2000 Independent Games Festival finalist. Ben is also the author of Serious Games: Improving Public Policy through Game-Based Learning and Simulation Whitepaper for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and was a contributor to Game Developer magazine. Ben also is the author of two books on gaming for Coriolis Group Books and is developing a book on simulations with Paraglyph Press. He has published several research reports on the games industry for DFC Intelligence. ian bogost georgiA institute oF tecHnoLogY & persuAsiVe gAMes LLc Ian is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues. Ian is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, along with several other books and many other writings. He is currently co-authoring a book on the Atari 2600 along with a number of new videogames for that platform. Ian is also completing a game about the politics of nutrition, commissioned by PBS and the iTVS, and designing editorial “newsgames” in a groundbreaking game publishing relationship with the New York Times. Visit www.gdconf.com for daily coverage of GDC 2008 49 http://www.gdconf.com/?cid=GDC08_showguide http://www.gdconf.com/?cid=GDC08_showguide
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