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Serious Games Summit
View All Sessions | View All Speakers | Advisors
March 9-10, 2010
The Serious Games Summit focuses on the growing application of videogames and videogame technologies for purposes outside of commercial entertainment. This includes projects using game resources or games for training, health, education, national defense, science, advertising, and general productivity. Each year the summit gathers leading projects, researchers, and sponsors of serious game projects to look at and discuss the continued emergence and growth of the space. This year marks the 7th iteration of the Serious Games Summit @ GDC. In 2010 the focus of the summit is on rethinking the conventional wisdom of the space and especially exploring the growing overlap of serious games with commercial entertainment in areas such as exercise, personal improvement, technology licensing, and more.
Summit Sponsor:
Keynotes
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Theme is Not Meaning In this opening Serious Games Summit Keynote, game designer Soren Johnson explores the critical question of how to produce meaningful experiences that are uniquely tied to gameplay vs. the content wrapped around that play? Read more... |
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Seriously, Make YOUR Game! Two top indie developers inspire us to get things done; featuring Jason Rohrer (PASSAGE, BETWEEN) discussing E FOR EVERYONE: Making a mature game for the DS and Paolo Pedercini, Producer of EVERY DAY THE SAME DREAM and MCDONALD'S VIDEOGAME. This talk will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with Ian Bogost. Read more... |
Highlighted Sessions
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Code of Everand: Designing The Serious Casual MMO
Speaker: Kevin Cancienne (Area/Code) -
Prototyping for Engagement and Metaphor
Speaker: Borut Pfeifer (Plush Apocalypse Productions) -
Picture the Impossible: Building a Successful City-Wide ARG on Shoestring Budget
Speaker: Elizabeth Lawley (Rochester Institute of Technology) -
The Games for Learning Institute: Research on Design Patterns for Effective Educational Games
Speakers: Jan L. Plass (NYU), Ken Perlin (NYU), John Nordlinger (Microsoft Research)
View all Serious Games Summit sessions here.
Advisors
Ben Sawyer
Co-Founder, Digitalmill
Summit Chair
Ben Sawyer is the co-founder of Digitalmill, a games consulting firm based in Portland, Maine. Since beginning his career in game development over ten years ago, Sawyer has pioneered major initiatives in the field of serious games and has become a nationally recognized leader within the games community. In 2002, he co-founded the Serious Games Initiative, a project of the U.S. Government's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The following year, Sawyer organized the first-ever Serious Games Summit. In 2004, Sawyer also co-founded the Games for Health project, an initiative which has built the primary social and professional networks of the health games industry. As a game developer, Sawyer has worked on over one dozen major serious game projects. In 2000, Sawyer began producing "Virtual U," which was an award finalist at that year’s Independent Games Festival. Sawyer has also served as a designer, producer, advisor, and/or manager on projects for Cisco, DARPA, ONR, Leimandt Foundation, Cadbury, USAID, Lockheed Martin, and several other Fortune 500 organizations.
Ian Bogost
Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology & Founding Partner, Persuasive Games
Ian is a video game designer, critic, and researcher. He is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers video games as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues.
Ian is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Video game Criticism, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, and co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. He is currently co-authoring a book on games and journalism, making new artgames for the Atari 2600, and working on new titles for the iPhone and Nintendo DS.
Jane McGonigal
Director of Game Research and Development, Institute of the Future
Jane McGonigal is Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto, California. A pioneer in the field of alternate reality gaming, her previous projects include Superstruct, The Lost Ring, World Without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, and I Love Bees. She is an expert on applying game design and game theory to real work and real business, and has consulted and developed internal game workshops for leading technology companies in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., as well as more than a dozen Fortune Global 500 Companies. MIT Technology Review named her one of the top 35 innovators changing the world through technology, for her role in pioneering the field of alternate reality gaming, and Harvard Business Review called her theory of alternate reality business one of the Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas of 2008. She blogs at www.avantgame.com and has a PhD in performance studies and has taught game design and game studies at UC Berkeley and at the San Francisco Art Institute.
