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 | | XBox News | | | |  | | |  Serious Games Summit featured at 2004 GDC
Friday, December 19th, 2003
The Serious Games Initiative formally announced that it will hold a two-day summit on "serious games" used for education, training, and public policy applications at the 2004 Game Developers Conference (GDC). Over the last several years computer and video games have played increasingly important roles in areas such as public policy, education, corporate management, and healthcare.
At the Serious Games Summit, representatives from the game industry, academics, government, and the private sector will bring more definition to this emerging field. The Summit will provide crucial information to developers who want to build serious games and organizations who wish to put serious games applications to use. The Summit was developed by the Serious Games Initiative (www.seriousgames.org) as well as other leading advocates of using games for learning, training, and policy including "Digital Game-Based Learning" author Marc Prensky, game designer Noah Falstein, Breakaway Games CEO, Doug Whatley and the International Game Developers Association
"Game developers are already building the types of games that the Serious Games Summit will discuss. Not only is this a growing economic outlet, but it also shows new and different ways of exploiting games and game technology." said Alan Yu, director of the GDC.
The Serious Games Summit takes place March 22-23, 2004 during the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose, Calif. The GDC is the largest and most important professional development event for the game development community. Scheduled for March 22 - 26, 2004 the conference features more than 300 lectures and workshops designed to provide inspiration and build skills, and provides an independent forum for developers from around the world to set the agenda for the next generation of games.
For more information on the Serious Games Summit, or to register, please visit www.gdconf.com.
The Serious Games Summit agenda includes:
A "Serious Games" state of the union presentation designed to cover the special aspects of this new gaming area.
A customer panel, where representatives from a foundation, corporation, non-profit organization, and the U.S. Government will discuss the scenarios they believe games can help them solve, and what they think people are looking for from developers and project designers.
A military-use panel featuring Col. Casey Wardynski of America's Army and JC Herz, author of Joystick Nation.
Kurt Squire from the University of Wisconsin, MIT's Games-To-Teach, and newly announced Education Arcade project will present research results and metrics concerning cognitive learning issues, games, and gameplay.
Noah Falstein and a panel of game design experts will discuss specific rules and design axioms for games used in learning and policy environments.
"Digital Games-Based Learning" author Marc Prensky will lead a discussion on how serious games can move from a series of experiments to a flood of products.
Ben Sawyer, from The Serious Games Initiative, will present Funding 101, which describes in detail the many specific models for funding non-entertainment titles and projects.
Randy Hinrichs from Microsoft Research Learning Science and Technology research team will discuss lessons learned building smart gaming environments, and integrating emerging technologies for learning into gaming.
The Serious Games Summit will also feature a half-dozen project presentations where current game projects will be outlined in a case-style format. A two-hour working group session will allow all participants the chance to provide a wide-range of recommendations to independent project groups and all attendees concerning how to grow the market, and improve the impact of games in society.
The Serious Games Summit is sponsored in part by Microsoft Research.
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