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07 Jun 10

Serious Games and Educational Games at Games4change

News | Jörg Hofstätter

I attended the games4change (g4c) conference in New York last week. 

It was held at Parsons The New School for Design May 24.-26th. I had doubts go go there since it is a long way from Vienna and we were pretty busy in the office but I can safely say it was the right decision to go there. The line-up and program was pretty impressive, especially because g4c is a rather familiar gathering of I would guess about 300 people. 
I started by attending the all-day workshop G4C 101.5: How to make Social Issue Games.
Mary Flanagan Sherman shared interesting thoughts on games as a cultural media which represent systems and structures. Naomi Clark, an independent game developer brought insights and trends on social games using Facebook. Unsurprisingly she predicts that the Game Industry will discover that copying the "Farmville Formula" works best.

 

My favorite talk of that day was held by Gobion Rowland from Oxford based independent games studio red redemption (they have nothing to to with red dead redemption). He talked about their last game and how they went out to get the money for it. Fate of the Worldis a game which features scenarios of climate change covering the next 200 years  and will be published in August.

After another great talk on Publishing paradigms by Alan Gershenfeld and a panel on top 10 mistakes people make in the field of funding, deisng, pr, funding, production and assessment I learned a lot about how to make and publish Serious Games and the conference attendance already paid off for me. (I wrote down all points and printed them and pinned them up in the office)

The next day started with a refrenshing talk by Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer (I herby demand the Austran Administration needs a CTO as well). 

Both Future of Digital Media Talks, a format which started by mini talks of the Participants (7-10 mins) and ended in a Discussion with the Audience. I wished Katie Salen would have talked longer about Quest2learn, a school whose curriculum organized around games and digital culture she founded. I think she really hits the nerve when saying things like "We wanted to make a social network where kids could make a ton of mistakes" or "games are a great medium to teach children how systems work". I really look forward to see her again at the F.R.O.G. Conference this September in Vienna.

She was also recently profiled in the Moments of Genius series.

Nick Bilton, the Lead Technology Writer/Reporter for The New York Times and author of the Bits Blog showed great slides on Research he did for the NYT. He also had a message for those who claim that our brains are not "designed" to play computer games "Our brains were not designed to read 5.000 years ago" and the one who need a Laparoscopic Surgeon "get a gamer".

Day 3 (Festival day 2) was equally interesting, find a most-things-covering Blog here.


Fazit
The conference was a great inspiration and opportunity to talk with like-minded people. A ton of good ideas and advices will influence the game on renewable energies we are currently working on. (which we will hopefully present at g4c next year).

I also hope to keep up contact with all the interesting people I met at g4c. Go there is Gaming for good is an issue that really bothers you.

 

ps. I will put the link to the videos here as soon as they are online.

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