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Showing posts from October, 2010

Nat Geo's Great Migrations Serious Game – MOVE!

Serious Games to move as millions and survive as one A new Social "Serious Game" is being hosted at the NGC website as part of the promotion for their upcoming seven-part series, Great Migrations that begins November 7.   Narrated by Alec Baldwin, the series is the biggest programming event in the Channel's history, taking over 3 years to make and tracking over 420,000 miles of animal migrations across 20 countries in all seven continents. Great Migrations Social Game MOVE! extends the magnificent experience of Great Migrations online via social game, and simulates the zebra and wildebeest migration.  MOVE! puts the viewer at the head of the herd and challenges each herd to survive the 150-mile trek through a salt and sand desert hundreds of zebras make in Botswana and complete the 300-mile journey wildebeest make across Kenya and Tanzania each year. Players can participate in one of 14 regional teams that will be playing real-time across the g

Motion Capture Leverages Serious Games For Health

One of the launch games for Microsoft’s Kinect, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved , and a motion-capture based interactive game developed by Austrian researchers to aid in physical therapy both use a similar projection of a digital avatar in order to instruct players on appropriate motion for each activity. Specialists from the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at the Vienna University of Technology and Interactive Systems worked with Serious Games Interactive to develop a physical therapy game that works in conjunction with a motion-capture system and “data suit” made of small reflecting balls—sensed by an eight-point infrared camera system. The system is compared to the yoga portion of Ubisoft's upcoming Kinect title Your Shape: Fitness Evolved , which achieves similar goals. Your Shape: Fitness Evolved Kinect combines a camera, depth sensor and array of microphones in order to identify and track the people in front of it. It's an all-body exper

Serious Gaming To Fund Creative Projects: Gameful Funded @ Kickstarter

Kickstarter is an online platform that enables just about anyone to raise funding from interested individuals. Kickstarter works like a Social Serious Game: it is a new vehicle to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors, spreading them fast and wide, and engaging a large group of people who can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement. It is not about investing: people who start projects on the platform to get funded by others retain 100% ownership over everything, but need to find a way to give people an incentive to pledge. Kickstarter is powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands. Kickstarter also doubles as a publishing platform where project creators can keep anyone or only their backers how the project is doing with text, pictures and videos. The Gameful - a Secret HQ for Worldchanging Game Developers , project by Jane McGonigal, has successfully raised its funding goal on Sept

@ Forrester: Why Tech Companies Should Take Serious Games Seriously

Via: Forrester Blogs - IBM Shows Why Tech Companies Should Take Serious Games Seriously Serious Games communicating your value proposition more effectively than any ROI calculator Tom Grant, Ph.D., Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, serves Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals, helping product managers in IT companies hone these critical skills and help the company decide which areas the product management organization needs to emphasize.    He has recently blogged about how "Serious Games" do a lot more than just grabbing our attention: they are a powerful tool for a B2B company like IBM to market its products and services in a way that engages the customer more deeply, making the company's value proposition more clear and compelling.   Tom provides hard evidence on how IBM has been making a serious investment in Serious Games for quite a while (e.g. overview of the work IBM has done with USC , the BPM game INNOV8   and CityOne ).

Video Games Serious Business In Massachussets

An Emergent Video Game Cluster Via: NEWS Telegram.com Lisa Eckelbecker TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF reports that a video game cluster (my note: and maybe a "Serious Game" one) has emerged steadily in Massachusetts. T he state's nascent video game cluster employs an estimated 1,200 people at 76 companies with about $2 billion in annual revenue and although it represents a tiny sliver of the state's economy, it's still considered one of the nation's top video game locations, along with California, Texas, Washington and New York. According to Michael Cavaretta, one of the founding members of the gaming special interest group of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, "it makes a lot of sense for us to focus on the industry”. “It's a growing industry. It's going to continue to grow. It is becoming ubiquitous at this point. People who are becoming young adults have grown up with video games. They don't know a world without video games, an

Blog Action Day: Serious Games For Water Conservation

Serious Game to successfully managing a river catchment Via: ABC Catchment Detox Game Catchment Detox is an easy-to-play but tough-to-master online Serious Game from Australia. Catchment Detox is an online game challenging the player to successfully managing a river catchment while creating a sustainable, healthy economy. According to the experts that perform a similar juggling act in real life, “the challenge of planning and implementing activities on a catchment scale is a very complex issue, and the game to a large degree picks that up. The wonderful thing about the game is that there's instant feedback about the impact of industries and the cost of removing or changing land uses. In reality it's not so simple.” Experts’ suggestions for doing well in the game, and in real-life catchment management as well are to keep that need to balance industry and ecology in mind, and to move industries away from the edges of watercourses.   In 100 turns, you decid

Serious Games Promote Diversity in Scientific Workforce

Molly Carnes co-director of the Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is being funded $2 million over three years by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in an effort to diminish the effects of implicit, unintentional biases against women, minorities, and people with disabilities in faculty hiring decisions — with a video game. Via: University of Wisconsin-Madison News - Major Grant Aims At Breaking The Habit Of Implicit Bias Oct. 11, 2010 -by David Tenenbaum A University of Wisconsin-Madison doctor who has long worked to increase the entry of women into the scientific workforce has won a grant to develop video games to uncover and neutralize implicit, unintentional biases against women, minorities and people with disabilities. After years of effort, many fields in science, math, engineering and medicine still have trouble attracting and retaining women and minorities, and all find women underrepresented

STEM Serious Games Challenge: Developer Prize Now Open

Spreading the Word The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, in partnership with E-Line Media, has just launched the National STEM Video Game Challenge and is now accepting applications!!! They are hoping to get applications from a large and diverse group of developers and entrepreneurs from around the country, and they need our help. Not only do they hope that many of us will consider applying, but they would sincerely appreciate it if we could take the time to spread the word within our networks. Inspired by President Obama as part of his Educate to Innovate campaign , the National STEM Video Game Challenge aims to motivate interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) learning by tapping into students’ natural passions for playing and making video games. Sponsors of the National STEM Video Game Ch allenge are AMD Foundation, Entertainment Software Association and Microsoft. Founding outreach partners include the American Association of School Libra

JoyTunes: Serious Games Revolutionizing Music Learning

Via: JoyTunes – Music Serious Games For Fun and Education JoyTunes has just released its educational "Serious Game" which teaches kids how to play musical instruments by playing a video game. It has been launched as a fun and educational product that introduces a brand new way for children to learn how to play an instrument. Please check out the media release below for the full story. JoyTunes Revolutionizes Music Learning JoyTunes merges cutting-edge technology with proven methodology to take children’s musical education to a whole new level Tel Aviv, Israel – October 14, 2010 – Have you ever wanted your child to learn a musical instrument but never knew where to start or how to motivate them to play? JoyTunes is an interactive educational game that’s changing the way children are being introduced to music. By bringing hi-tech innovation to musical education, JoyTunes teaches the skills of playing an instrument through the medium of a fun computer

EU In Readiness For Mainstreaming Serious Games In Education

Following on my post 2010 Horizon Report: Educational Serious Games Adoption - 2 To 3 Years  dated April 2010, and revisiting some of the “Serious Games in Education” ongoing projects for institutional transformation, it seems that the European Union is in readiness for mainstreaming "Serious Games" in education according to the referred timeline. Here is anecdotal evidence. Project: GaLA - Games and Learning Alliance Countries: The GaLA Consortium involves 31 partners, coming from 14 countries all over the EU: Italy, Germany, Austria, Finland, UK, Spain, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Portugal, France, Romania and Ireland. Scope: GaLA motivation stems from the acknowledgment of the potentiality of Serious Games for education and training and the need to address the challenges of the main stakeholders of the Serious Games European landscape. GaLA aims to shape the scientific community and build a European Virtual Research Centre a

GaLA Kick-Off: Newly Created Network of Excellence in Serious Games

GaLA - Games and Learning Alliance is the Network of Excellence on "Serious Games" funded by the European Union in FP7 – IST ICT, Technology Enhanced Learning with a budget of 5.65m Euros. GaLA has started on October 11th 2010, with a three-day kick-off meeting, and will last 4 years. The official website is being set-up. GaLA gathers the cutting-the-edge European Research & Development organizations on Serious Games, involving 31 partners from 14 countries. Partnership involves universities, research centers, and developer and education industries. GaLA motivation stems from the acknowledgment of the potentiality of Serious Games for education and training and the need to address the challenges of the main stakeholders of the Serious Games European landscape. GaLA aims to shape the scientific community and build a European Virtual Research Centre aimed at gathering, integrating, harmonizing and coordinating research on Serious Games and dissemin

The Inherent Value Of Running Your Business Like A Serious Game

Pic from Wizgame: Gamify Your Business The "Serious Games" Based Economy Unfolds Early September, Fortune Tech reported that companies are realizing that the very same game-play mechanics used in games to hook gamers are an effective way to create business value and therefore are slowly wending their way into other parts of the economy. The article Play To Win: The Game-Based Economy presents gamification examples that show that it is possible to build game-like incentives into non-game applications, creating win-win situations for both the Brand and the Consumer. 2007: Mint - Personal Finance Game Mint.com transformed personal finance into a game. Saving towards a trip to Hawaii? Choose that option from a menu, and as you deposit more funds towards toward it, a gauge fills, showing you how close you are financially to hopping that plane. Mint also gives each user a total financial score that encourages financially responsible behavior. Scores spike if u