Serious Games 07 in Derry

my understanding is that this is about games for education, training etc.

there are a handful of companies involved in serious games although it looks like some of the companies and students coming off the NWIFE courses are very interested in this space.

as for speakers, promo etc…I don’t know anything..

anyone else?

Aphra.

Is this being organised by the IGDA Ireland committee like the original Awakenings or is it being organised seperately?

Will keep my eyes peeled.

no this is not being organised by the IGDA committee.

NORIBIC is behind it.

Aphra.

by the way if someone is going to this event it would be great to get a brief report and maybe pics for gd.ie….PM me if you are…

Aphra.

I’ll be going and possibly posting some pics on my personal blog. We’ll see how it goes!

I’m not sure I would be the best person to prepare a brief report however.

I would go if they had more details on exactly what they are covering. Also demonstrations during lunch and coffee breaks is relatively weak, but I could be misreading that.

http://www.noribic.com/sga/default.asp?sec_id=6

It is pretty poor that they haven’t stated who the speakers are. Have they even got any? I mean why else would they not write their names up?

Anyway, I’ll be there. I can PM some sort of report although I will be demonstrating during the breaks and I’m not exactly great at reviewing, however I’ll be able to write some sort of brief report. I can’t guarantee it though, but I’ll do my best.

see how it goes..I think a few of my former colleagues from UU are also going so they may be able to do something too

Aphra.

I was considering heading up but I’m already looking pretty busy for that weekend. Burkey, I’m sure whatever information you can share will be appreciated. It’s certainly better than nothing.

Will let you know if I end up making it after all.

From Wikipedia:

A serious game is a software application developed with game technology and game design principles for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.[/quote:aa028a1874]

Serious Games Industry in Ireland
Over the last decade, Ireland has become one of the largest exporters of computer software in the world. However, the Serious Games Software development and application sector has received little attention from Industrial Development Agencies, Academia and Financiers in a market where we can make a Serious impact by leading the way, despite estimates that the US market will be worth $10.8bn (andpound;6bn) by 2007 (Source Financial Times, September 2006). The Serious Games Awakening Conference aims to place Ireland on the Serious Games Industry map and explore the challenges facing Ireland in this fast changing industry.[/quote:aa028a1874]

Riiiiight. So…the US market for ‘Serious Games’ is $10.8bn. Does anyone else read that statement like that too?

CanDo are heading up, and showing the "NanoQuest" Serious Game we completed for the Irish Government ( was sent out on CD to all of the secondary schools in Ireland )

http://www.nanoquest.ie

Also, will be showing some of our less gamey, but still using "Game Technology", stuff, like the Resistors 3D Science Experiments…

http://www.candointeractive.com/resistors

Will maybe show a few sneak peaks of current work also :)

Serious Games can cover a lot of areas, from creating new games from scratch that focus on one element, right through to using a multi-player Quake-like games to allow people from different sides to come together and play, through to using SimCity as a way of teaching kids about the cause/effect and cost of building urban environments.

It’ll be interesting to see what’s happening in Ireland with regard to this area

The term "Serious Games" definitely seems to hold more of a sway with funders than edutainment / eLearning has over the previous years etc – I’m sure there are a handful of different reasons for this, such as the accessibility of 3D technologies and broadband ( even for less well off students – an important factor for this area ), the emergence of 3D as a "must have" over traditional 2D / Flash interactive content, forcing eLearning to look more 3D and therefore more game-like, and as a result also increasing the budgets allocated etc. Or it’s just a passing fad, who knows? :)

Mal

The guest speakers are now up:

http://www.noribic.com/sga/default.asp?sec_id=6

Professor. Paul E. Fullwood

Paul Fullwood has been appointed Professor and First Chair of Computer Games Technology at the University of Abertay – Dundee. He is the Director of IC-CAVE (the International Center for Computer Arts and Virtual Entertainment) an EU-funded video games research center. Paul is one of the founders of LoudWolf Holdings Ltd. He is also President and COO Digital Animation Inc. A founding partner of Edison Research Labs and chairman of The First Fruits Charities Inc. Formerly, Paul was Vice President, Head of World-Wide Studios for Hasbro Interactive also Vice President, Product Development for Lightspan Inc., and Founder and President of Accent Media Productions Inc.

Paul is a board member of various other companies. He is also a member of Senate for the University of Abertay.

David Wortley, Director, Serious Games Institute

David Wortley is Director of the Serious Games Institute (SGI) at Coventry University. He is responsible for the development of the Institute as a brand new self-financing initiative to establish a centre of excellence for the emerging serious games application area. Working with academics, regional development agencies and leading computer games companies, David aims to make the SGI a thought leader and focal point for games based learning, simulation and immersive 3D virtual environments.

David`s career began with a university scholarship from British Telecom to study electronic and electrical engineering at Birmingham University. After graduation, his commercial career has been spent in the converging technologies of telecommunications (British Telecom – where he also spent time as a Management Tutor at the BT Management Training College), computing (IBM – corporate sales), and digital media (Mass Mitec) with a focus on technology for competitive advantage, education and business communications.

Claus Nehmzow – PA Consulting

Claus heads up PA Consulting`s thinking in business applications of participatory media and virtual world like Second Life. He has almost twenty-five years experience in technology and strategy consulting as well as operational management experience.

Claus has broad international experience in global business development and consulting as well as from having lived for many years each in Germany, Switzerland, USA, and the UK. Claus was COO/ International Business Development director at mobile startup Shazam, Managing Director of Viant Germany, an Internet consultancy, Partner and Vice President at Booz-Allen Hamilton in London and New York, Senior Manager at accenture/Andersen Consulting. In Zurich, New York, London

Professor Lizbeth Goodman, SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, and Magic Gamelab

Dr Lizbeth Goodman is Professor of Creative Technology Innovation, and Founder/Director of the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, and Magic Gamelab, based at the University of East London and at international sister sites globally. She is the Director of Studies for a large cohort of UEL`s practice-based PhD students Digital Media Performance Technologies: a team of professional new media artists, technologists, urban planners, and engineers conducting collaborative research into the transdisciplinary fields of technology development and art, e-health, e-inclusion, haptics and art-sci`. Her main fields of speciality are gender representation in the digital media (performance, film, moving image and games/virtual environments) and the creation of learning games developed WITH, not only for, people with disabilities and non-standard gamers`.

Lizbeth was previously founder and Director of the SMARTlab Centre at Central Saint Martins College of Art andamp; Design (2001-5). In an earlier incarnation, she founded and led the INMPR (Institute for New Media Performance Research) at the University of Surrey, following on from eight years leading the BBC Open University`s multimedia research teams in Shakespeare, Drama, Gender Studies and Literature. She has worked extensively for the BBC as a researcher, writer and presenter of Learning and Arts/Media: some of her pioneering work in multimedia perspective-driven drama and theatre games won awards and sold as bestsellers` through Routledge and BBC Worldwide in the 1990s. She is also a regular reviewer/validator for many independent courses, publishers and broadcasters, and for major funding bodies and award panels internationally. Professor Goodman won the Lifetime Achievement Award for volunteer service to women and children in 2003, and has just been named Microsoft Community Affairs Senior Research Fellow on Creative Technology Innovation.

Roo Reynolds, Metaverse Evangelist, IBM

Andrew (Roo) Reynolds is a Metaverse Evangelist based at IBM`s Hursley Park laboratory in the UK. He is part of a team which facilitates the use of Virtual Worlds within IBM. All of this work is made all the more enjoyable thanks to a large world-wide community who are learning to collaborate and get things done in totally new ways.

He was previously an Emerging Technologies Specialist in which his role included attempting to keep on the early-adopter curve. While acknowledging there are not enough hours in the day to claim to be an expert in everything, Roo still reads and writes far too many blogs and tries to keep his eyes open.andnbsp; He enjoys exploring and building in the metaverse that is Second Life, uploading his photos to Flickr, keeping his bookmarks on del.icio.us, updating his playlist on Last.fm tracking his location on Plazes and what he is doing on Twitter, as well as indulging in any number of other bleeding-edge alpha geek social software type activities. Roo is married to an artist, who tries her hardest to keep him balanced.[/quote:7966cb078b]

Hi Peter,

"Serious Games" could cover the use of existing A or AAA titles as part of teaching of a concept, so in this case games dev experience isn’t required.

In a way, this part of it – showing that games could be a useful as a teaching tool – should create a demand for more games to be used, including custom games.

In this area – creating custom Serious Games – a lot of smaller indie companies will be able to generate revenue.

Of course games dev experience is required – but not really at a very high level due to the smaller budgets and requements of the game.

Regards…
Mal

the conference tomorrow will be available through second life on the University of Ulster magee campus island (thanks magee :D )

http://slurl.com/secondlife/University%20Ulster%20Magee/232/149/37

Just click the link and it’ll take you to a teleporter.

thanks for letting us know…

Aphra.

http://www.noribic.com/sga/default.asp?sec_id=2

Schedule for the day is also up now.

The event was well worth attending – if just to meet up with and see what other game developers are working on in this area.

The speakers were for the most part very informative and entertaining, so hopefully there will be another Awakening style event in Ireland in the near future.

Congrats to Wendy from Noribic, who went to great efforts to get the event organised!
Mal

thanks for letting us know Mal.

I had a look around the second life space – are you supposed to be able to see all the slides of peoples presentations or just the title ones?

anyone else get there…?

Aphra.

Yeah I was there for most of it, although we left early. I’ll submit a report later this week all being well :) As I said before I’m not the best report but hopefully I’ll come up with something worth reading ;)

great..thanks….

Aphra.