serious games

  • News games on the rise

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 16 Comments

    Dan Terdiman has an article on the rapid proliferation of “news games,” which were an unusual and even controversial genre a few years ago when Ian Bogost and others started pushing them. Today, they are all over the place, thanks to the huge Flash community: tiny games that serve as a replacement for editorial cartoons (editorial cartooning, btw, is a business that is apparently in trouble).

    When we talked five to ten years ago about how games were going to be the dominant medium of this century, I don’t think most people were thinking in terms of this sort of tiny minigame, mostly made by amateurs. And yet, I think that is kind of where we’re going.

    It makes me ponder, what other areas of media will have little games slip in and replace the old way of doing things? We could maybe walk through the newspaper and see: how about classifieds? Obituaries? The social column? The letters column? Anyone got a Flash game to replace the Arts page?

    Some choice quotes:

    Doherty’s Fubra bought Sock and Awe from its original creator on eBay for more than $8,000, but said ads on the game earned the money back in just 48 hours. And Tocci said his creations earn money from royalties paid by the casual games sites that host the titles.

    That leads to staggering numbers like the 14.5 million viruses tackled in Swinefighter and the 93.5 million shoes tossed at Bush in Sock and Awe alone. Tocci’s Double Bird Strike has been played more than 400,000 times.

    “It’s a shame the innovation (of providing CDC advice about swine flu in Swinefighters) was left to two entrepreneurs,” said Doherty. “It would have been great if the World Health Organization had realized they could use a game to raise awareness about preventing swine flu.”

    — ‘News games’ put public in charge of hot topics | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.

  • Real world LA government Town Hall in Metaplace

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 9 Comments

    This was cool — State Representative Nancy Landry of Louisiana just held a town hall meeting in Metaplace. A big part of the event was Q&A sessions with a middle school class run by teacher Margret Atkinson of Northwestern Middle School, and in attendance were the state’s Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, and the school’s principal, Debby Brian. I believe a few blog posts elsewhere and a video of the event are forthcoming. Eidt: and here’s one.

    I was asked to give brief remarks on digital citizenship, and here they are:

    So I was asked to make a few comments about digital citizenship, and I think the thing that most strikes me about an event like this is the fact that citizenship is the same whether it exists in the real world or a digital framework. Here we all are at this wonderful event, and the things that we are talking about in this cartoony, digital world are big important, real world issues, like funding for science education, and the legislative process.

    Online communities are a VENUE, not an end in themselves. They are just a new way for us to engage in very old practices. And I think that if we managed to transplant some folks from ancient Athens and given them an intensive course in language and computer literacy, they would be perfectly at home with the substance of the discussions today!

    At the same time, I think that it also highlights how important that digital literacy IS; after all, without those lessons, they would be less able to participate. And as our society’s tech capabilities grow, I think it’s wonderful to see that our society — and legislators — and principals and school superintendents, and teachers — are willing to invest in that literacy so that future voters, citizens, will be able to participate to the best of their ability using this new technology.

    So I want to just say thank you to all of you for taking the plunge!

  • Games for Health conference

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    It’s coming up!

    http://www.gamesforhealth.org

    5th Annual Games for Health Conference in Boston on June 11-12 with Pre-Conference on June 10.

    Over 60 sessions on many many topics.

    People who enter beb09 @ registration get a 15% discount

    Also direct registration at: http://www.regonline.com/gfh2009

    Content summaries so far at:
    http://www.gamesforhealth.org/archives/000253.html

  • Play games, improve your eyes

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 10 Comments

    Latest from the games-are-good-for-you department:

    The findings, reported in the March 29 issue of Nature, indicate that action games offer players the chance to improve their contrast perception by as much as 58%.

    via Video Game Play Improves Eyesight — Video Games — InformationWeek.

    The findings show that you have to play FPSes like UT2k4 and CoD2, and not games like The Sims 2. So you may improve your “contrast perception” but presumably the industry’s critics will then assert that you traded your eyesight for temporary boosts in aggressivity. 🙂

  • Akoha, social game for kindness

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 47 Comments

    Akoha is an interesting idea — one bound to run right up against the qualms of those folks who dislike using games for social engineering.

    You buy a deck of cards for about $5. It has missions in it, like “buy a couple in love drinks,” “donate an hour of your time,” or “give someone a book.”

    Once you do the good deed, you give the card to the reicipient of the good deed, and they “play it forward” — the mission is now theirs. They also go to the website and register the deed so that you get credited with points. You can track the movement of the cards across the world, kind of like how you can track dollar bills with Where’s George.

    You gain points, you level up, and eventually you unlock perks like the ability to create your own missions — the plan is they will print your own custom deck of cards for you. Cory, here’s your whuffie.

    If you look at their “learn more” link (engagingly done as a photocomic) you can see that they do envision this being mostly played among friends, although mention is made of strangers. In that sense, it is less a serious game than it is a social game, but the pay it forward element, should it offer enough incentives, has interesting potential. I could easily see something like this catching on among the sort of widely dispersed tech-savvy folks who make up the web and gaming communities…