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Showing posts from August, 2013

Paid Mobile Learning Content Shapes B2C Serious Games Market

Consumers are the top buyers worldwide of edugame packaged content and suppliers are capitalizing on consumers’ interests: early childhood education, tourism, health, fitness and wellness, cognitive fitness, nature, and sustainability Tyson Greer, Ambient Insight LLC CEO, delivered a great presentation on Mobile Edugame Market Innovations at Serious Play Conference 2013  held last week. Ambient Insight forecasts revenues for six types of Mobile Educational Serious Games: . Knowledge-based games . Skills-based games . Brain training and cognitive fitness games . Language learning games . Location-based learning games (emerged in 2009) . Mobile augmented reality games (emerged in 2010) Key findings from Ambient Insight Research reveal that in North America the growth rate for all Game-based Learning is 10.1%, but for mobile edugames is 15.3% - and from 2012 to 2017 mobile edugames revenues will more than double. Cross-platform products (web & app on de

Jesse Schell On Serious Games @ Serious Play 2013

Jesse Schell not “only” delivered the pre-conference workshop talk Secrets of Amazing Transformational Games and the keynote address What Games Are Good At that kicked off the 2013  Serious Play Conference  last week, but he is also one of the gold medal winners of the International Serious Play Awards competition with the "Serious Game"  Play Forward: Elm City Stories in the Healthcare/Medical category. Yale’s Play2Prevent initiative has partnered with Schell Games and Digitalmill to develop the game for the iPad, aimed at preventing HIV infection among ethnic minority adolescents. Elm City Stories immerses teens in the various consequences of their actions and how thinking differently and implementing new behaviors could be the difference to leading a healthy, HIV free life. In the game, players navigate through an interactive world encountering a series of life-altering choices along the way. Currently in the first round of clinical trials, the game is

Serious Play Announces Serious Games Awards Winners

MIT Game Lab’s Education Game Best of Show in the 2013 International Serious Play Awards Competition LOS ANGELES – Aug. 28, 2013 – MIT Game Lab’s education game, Phantomation , won Best of Show in the 2013 International Serious Play Awards competition.  Seven other studios won gold medals. The awards, announced at the 2013 Serious Play Conference at DigiPen Institute of Technology , honor exceptional examples of corporate, military, children’s education and games for good. Gold Medal winners included: ·         Play Forward: Elm City Stories , Schell Games and Digital Mill (Healthcare/Medical) ·         Cornak ,  Succubus Interactive  (Business) ·         DragonBox Algebra 12 , WeWantToKnow AS (Education) ·         Game Over Gopher , New Mexico State University Learning Games Lab (Education) ·         Planting the Seed , Canadian Space Agency (Education) ·         Practice Operations , Muzzy Lane Operations (Education) ·         Ratio Rumble , New Mexico

Democracy 3: Serious Games To Play Off Real Events

Positech Games is working on Democracy 3 , the sequel to the "Serious Game"  Democracy 2 , using a custom-designed neural network engine that delivers a better political simulation. The game is expected to be released for PC by the end of the year. Democracy was first developed by Positech Games in 2005, with a sequel released in December 2007. According to Rock Paper Shotgun , “Democracy 3 will benefit not only from updated code, being 95% written from scratch, it'll also update its political world to incorporate the events of the last five years.” The Democracy series offers one of the most complex political simulations on the market. Positech Games is a one man company based in the UK (England). Cliff Harris, the man behind Positech Games, has also created Kudos, Gratuitous Space Battles and Gratuitous Tank Battles. He firmly believes there is a growing audience for games that play off real events. Game Context and Gameplay The third version of the P

Serious Games To Experiment Business Models

Canvas Brokers by Ranj Serious Games the best Business Model Canvas game Early June, six teams of professional game developers gathered in Amsterdam for a three-day bootcamp. The Business Model Canvas: The Game bootcamp was organized by Business Models Inc and Dutch Game Garden and six different game studios got the assignment to develop a Serious Game based on the Business Model Canvas, by Alex Osterwalder, a method for mapping business strategy that has gained popularity in recent years. The game concept had to make clear how the various building blocks in a business model are connected, thus enabling companies to safely experiment with their business model. The teams were supported by innovation managers from various companies who were invited to attend, give feedback and follow the development process. On the last day of the event, game developers presented the playable prototypes they had developed. Three professional judges –Alex Osterwalder, Patrick van

Serious Games Replicate Pollinators Job

Little Bird Games LLC is attempting to embed educational games into a children's eBook app. The basic idea is that when kids read with their parents they can choose to play a game that relates to the subject matter on the page.   For the first project the subject matter is honey bees.  The Lost Bee is a children’s eBook app that teaches about honey bees with games that replicate honey bee jobs. There are also environmental messages in the book about pesticide use and pollinator friendly farming. Entomologists are exploring the causes of a massive die-off of the honey bee population. Colony collapse disorder (CCD), harmful pesticides, genetically modified organism (GMO) crops, and monoculture farming have put not only bees, but also all pollinators in danger. Pollinator decline not only has alarmed the scientific community but has gained prominence in the popular press, raising the public's awareness about threats to our ecosystem. The U.S. Department of Agricu

Submissions Open: 2013 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge

The Serious Games Showcase & Challenge announced that they are now accepting games for the 2013 competition.   The SGS&C , that occurs at each year's I/ITSEC (Interservice/Industry Training & Simulation Conference), is the world’s largest modeling & simulation event, incorporating evaluation teams from Industry, Academia and Government.  All finalists are provided free entry to the conference as well as space in the SGS&C booth to demonstrate their game to a worldwide training, simulation and education audience in Orlando, Florida. All award winners are announced on the final day of the conference and invited to the  I/ITSEC Awards Reception. Finalists are also invited to sit with the Serious Games Showcase & Challenge Planning Committee at the Awards Banquet. Before entering make sure you read the  rules and understand what categories your game qualifies for. There are 3 Categories to enter to - Business, Student, and Government

Serious Games Immerse Players In Mayan Number System

PRESS RELEASE MAYANUMBERS: MODERN TWIST ON ANCIENT MATH SYSTEM MayaNumbers Challenges Players to Race against the Clock and Count Like the Maya Everyone knows 1 + 1 = 2. But do you know Dot + Line = 6?  Dig-It! Games , an independent developer of "Serious Games" founded by a former archaeologist and middle school teacher, blends fun and learning for students, specifically those within the important middle school demographic, with its latest release,  MayaNumbers . The new math Serious Game challenges players’ math skills while teaching the ancient Maya’s revolutionary number system. MayaNumbers  turns math skills-building into a fun, fast-paced learning game that encourages players to think differently about addition, subtraction, and multiplication. Designed for children in grades 5-9, this companion app to Dig-It! Games’ award-winning Mayan Mysteries game provides an entertaining and educational experience to a category of children that currentl

Serious Games As Pathways From Architecture To Game Development

Morphopolis is a game about transformation and discovery PRESS RELEASE MORPHOPOLIS: CEMENTING THE TRANSFORMATION FROM ARCHITECT TO GAME DEVELOPER Announcing the point and click adventure with a fine art aesthetic 9th August 2013, Leamington Spa: Micro Macro Games launch the public Alpha of Morphopolis , their visually stunning point and click adventure, to coincide with their Steam Greenlight Campaign . Initially inspired by point and click adventures like Machinarium and The Tiny Bang Story, Morphopolis is a new game experience crafted by two architects. Micro Macro founder Dan Walters says “The game is about a journey; taking narrative from the environment, creating places through the division space, and evolving this world as your awareness of scale, mechanics and inhabitants change. These are concepts we discovered in architecture school, but they can be handled so much more playfully in an illustrated world.” The unique art style uses intricate

Serious Games International Brings Shakespeare To Life

Coventry Telegraph reports that Serious Games International has spent 18 months working on a revolutionary app that changes the way tourists interact with destinations.   Free to download from iTunes, Eye Shakespeare is designed to enhance the experience of tourists visiting Stratford. They can use it in seven different languages and it takes in key sites - including the five Shakespeare houses and five centuries of local history. Eye Shakespeare  uses augmented reality to bring Shakespeare to life. It also allows players to view a 3D reconstruction of Shakespeare’s final home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Users can bring Shakespeare into the scene and pose with him to capture photos of themselves with the world’s greatest writer in his home town. The souvenir pictures can then be digitally printed at the Shakespeare Birthplace gift shop.  The app is the result of a pioneering partnership between Serious Games International, which is based at the Coventry Innovation Vi

Serious Games For Journalism: Playing A Story

ProPublica has co-published an interesting article with Source titled Creating Games For Journalism , by Sisi Wei. Sisi is the news applications developer at ProPublica, where she builds interactive stories (and newsgames) that serve the public interest. Previously, she was a Graphics Editor at the Washington Post. The article describes how journalists can learn a lot from video games, a medium that can help users explore unfamiliar worlds and experience stories through the eyes of another person, engaging them in a highly meaningful, memorable and influential way. It highlights the fact that many people who would never call themselves gamers are playing games and getting familiar with how the medium works. It also refers to the Serious Games community, dedicated to exploring how games can be used in education. The author states that games can be a great tool for journalists to reach and inform, pushing the boundaries of reader engagement. Video Games Let Readers P

Serious Games To Map The Brain

EyeWire is an online community of “citizen neuroscientists” who map neural connections by playing a Serious Game. Similarly to EteRNA and Foldit , EyeWire enlists collective intelligence to solve scientific problems. By playing EyeWire , you help map the retinal connectome (connections between cells in the brain) and contribute to the neuroscience research conducted by Sebastian Seung's Computational Neuroscience Lab at MIT. Inside the retina lies an incredibly dense tangle of interconnected neurons. If researchers can map the many connections between these cells, they will be closer to understanding how vision works. Citizen scientists can help map the connections of a neural network. No specialized knowledge of neuroscience is required. Their input will help scientists understand how the retina functions. It will also be used by engineers to improve the underlying computational technology, eventually making it powerful enough to detect "miswirings" of t