GDC Day 1: Morning

well the morning of day one is official in the bag! i made it through almost the whole morning before my body decided that food would be necessary to keep my blood sugar up and I had to sneak out before the last morning session, but 3 out of 4 ain't bad, right? I'm posting my notes from the a.m. below the break for those who are interested in what when on in the Serious Games Summit today.

Serious Games Summit
Monday
I. Serious Games Taxonomy
Ben Sawyer and Peter Smith

ALL GAMES ARE SERIOUS

justification for developing a taxonomy and Bg investigation and related taxonomy work

Why do we need a taxonomy?

Get all sg parties on the same page
Erase myths
Snapshot of the sg industry
Where is r&d lacking
Create foundation for future efforts and organizing

Serious games=games for learning or training is wrong.

Game Based “X” has been a precursor for Serious Games (i.E. Game-Based Simulation, Game-Based Visualization, Game-Based Education)

Serious Usage Segments
Wii Exergaming, CS, GH Sequencer, Maps for WoW, XNA club
Curriculum Development, Revolution, Use of Specialized Serious Games
Teaching Guides and Support Forums, etc

Games= Simulation + Media

Not local game night

Software but with media conventions
Highly stylized
Following specific expected conventions
Today’s games are about....

You can’t have a sg taxonomy without developing a taxonomy for all games

Taxonomy of Serious Games– Looking at the cross between the genre and the organizations and finding the types of games that meet at that intersection (i.E. Advergaming and Gov’t& NGOs= Political Games) the next slide shows the actual games (or prototypes that have been created and fit in those slots.

Looking at Games 4 Health and creating a taxonomy for that as well.

Advergaming– Toyota and Coke (YouTube) using WoW to reposition themselves

Games for Education
Serious games re-envisioned edutainment (non-commercial)
Repurposed COTs
Serious games as Re-envisioned Edutainment (commercial)
Over 150 citations found of COTS games being repurposed for serious purposes!

Games for Science and Research
Intersections of areas like data collection and research= player tracking stats in Halo 3 or data coll and development= google image labeler

Games for Production
Intersections of generating output (I.E game generation and video= The Movies (game) or intersection of media mash-ups and video= machinima).

Games as Work
Intersection between direct earnings and competitive= Online casinos/Skills Gaming
Free Rice game as an intersection between direct earnings and personal reward.
Serious COTS

Slides posted to Seriousgames.org

II. Gamestar Mechanic– Katie Salen and Greg Trefry
4 drivers of change:
Sociability of learning
Networks of information
Participatory/convergence culture
Games

Started with working with kids at the ross global academy

Assessment
Looking at info before and after the class.

GSM is a game about making games– world that runs on games; war breaks world into 6 genres of games; anime style; player has to repair broken games and try to reunify the world.

Games can be embedded in other places like myspace

Did a summer course to see if it could be upscaled to HS students to help them design other games in Minneapolis, MN.

Skills and competencies supported
System based thing
Interdisciplinary thinking
Specialist lang
Meta level reflection
Network literacy
Productive literacy

Showing the beta of the game. Building a community into the software. Students can rate and write reviews about the games as well as building and playing the game. Teaching them to be critical. Kind of like peer editing in the composition classroom. Very cool.

Katie says that the tool is much like crack cocaine to the students. Addictive learning.
Launch for public beta in June?

III. Make This Game Better: The Redistricting Game– Chris Swain

Cross-disciplinary effort: USC game innovation lab and other profs
Launched on capital hill in June of 2007
100+ news stories
13.5 million plays
www.redistrictinggame.Org

Why a game?

Provide experiential understanding of a difficult problem
More persuasive b/c of personal involvement
Way of addressing “wicked problems” as defined by Horst Rittel
Shared understanding
Dialog
Shared actions

Looking at the game play and how redistricting gets represented in the game based on how other parties and politicians will react to the changes in the map. The game also creates news paper pages and op-ed pieces.
Full Forum on the site and you can write your congress person directly from the game.

Lessons?
Excellent reception +
Excellent traffic to the site +
Moderate community built on site +
Low grass roots civic action generated-some letters to congress -
Zero impact of affecting change –

Where would we take this next if this were a 2.0 version?