About Serious Games

Serious games (SGs) or persuasive games are computer and video games used as persuasion technology or educational technology. They can be similar to educational games, but are often intended for an audience outside of primary or secondary education. Serious games can be of any genre and many of them can be considered a kind of edutainment.

Madden NFL 2010 Preview


Saturday 31 May 2008

Budget Hero

Budget Hero is an engaging and journalistically sound game that encourages players to think through the complexities and challenges of the federal budget and the major policy issues of the 2008 election. It frames the policy debate as a set of federal budget choices determining how money will be raised and spent.

Budget Hero forces players make tradeoffs and confront compromises inherent in balancing a budget. Can they be Budget Heroes by staying true to their values while creating a sustainable government?


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BOOM BLOX Trailer

Official first look at BOOM BLOX-- A Steven Spielberg | EA Game. In stores May 2008.



http://www.ea.com/boomblox/

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Monday 26 May 2008

SpotCrime: Google Maps Crime Mashup



SpotCrime is a mashup that plots recent criminal activity onto Google Maps, allowing users to shy away from seedier parts of towns they may not be familiar with. The company has offered a website for a few months now, and has just introduced an iPhone version.

more ...

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BBC's virtual island Adventure Rock


Adventure Rock is neither a television programme nor a radio show, but is a game aimed at 6-to-12-year-olds. Challenges are set each month and the virtual island incorporates “creative studios” where kids can create drawings, animations, music and so on.

Quietly launched a month ago - the BBC was keen to avoid a fanfare and risk bad publicity - Adventure Rock has been downloaded 55,000 times and is already notching up 2 million page views a month.

more ...


http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/adventurerock/


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Giant 'telescope' links London, New York



In all its optical brilliance and brass and wood, there stood the Telectroscope: an 11.2-meter-(37 feet) long by 3.3-meter-(11 feet) tall dream of a device allowing people on one side of the Atlantic to look into its person-size lens and, in real time, see those on the other side via a recently completed tunnel running under the ocean. (Think 19th-century Webcam. Or maybe Victorian-age video phone.)

And all the credit goes to British artist Paul St. George. If he had not been rummaging through great-grandpa Alexander's personal effects a few years ago, the Telectroscope might still exist only on paper, hidden away deep inside some old box.

more ...

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The Biggest Drawing in The World: Created With the Help of GPS and DHL




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Wednesday 21 May 2008

The next generation of internet connected GPS.




Dash GPS units connect to the internet via the cell phone network and Wi-Fi, thus they can provide many interesting new services.

http://www.dash.net/product/internet-two-way.php


Dash units report their location and speed to a central network. Users can then get highly accurate real-time traffic jam data:

http://www.dash.net/product/traffic-ddn.php

Destinations can be set by the user from their desk via a webpage, no more fiddling to enter a destination into the unit via touch screen.
http://www.dash.net/product/mydash-send2car.php

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Negroponte Unveils 2nd Generation OLPC Laptop: It’s an E-Book



Negroponte says the cost of this 2nd-generation device, which uses dual-touch screens with 16:9 aspect ratios, will be kept to $75. (Compare that to the $188 cost of the foundation’s current first-generation XO laptop.) Costs will be kept down in part by using screens built for portable DVD players.

more ...


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Tuesday 20 May 2008

Using simulation to treat a new generation of traumatized veterans.



When Travis Boyd agreed to become a subject in the Virtual Iraq clinical trial, in the spring of 2007, he became one of about thirty-five active-duty and former members of the military to use the program to treat their psychological wounds. Currently, the Department of Defense is testing Virtual Iraq—one of three virtual-reality programs it has funded for P.T.S.D. treatment, and the only one aimed at “ground pounders” like Boyd—in six locations, including the Naval Medical Center San Diego, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and Weill Cornell Medical College, in New York. According to a recent study by the RAND Corporation, nearly twenty per cent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are suffering from P.T.S.D. or major depression. Almost half won’t seek treatment. If virtual-reality exposure therapy proves to be clinically validated—only preliminary results are available so far—it may be more than another tool in the therapists’ kit; it may encourage those in need to seek help.

more ...

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Serious Game "Building Montréal"

Building Montréal, created by Pointe-à-Callière, Montréal Museum of Archaelogy and History, is a hybrid game combining principles of simulation games such as SimCity and quest games such as Zelda.


Players interact with the game intuitively; for example, they can build a house in a chosen location. They can also move characters around, have conversations and seek information to better orient their game decisions. Players must carry out short missions whose objectives are stated at the outset. During these missions, they must meet "challenges" in order to advance in the game.

More ...

Nadya JAHAN
SUCCUBUS interactive

nadya.jahan@succubus.fr
www.succubus.fr

Sunday 18 May 2008

Saturday 17 May 2008

The critical technology for the early phase of the industrial revolution was gin. The TV sitcom is today’s gin.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.



http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky


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The Power of Twitter



It's easy to laugh at nonsense on Twitter, the microblogging rage. "My nose is leaking," writes someone called Zapples, "so imma go to sleep now.…" But I've heard lots of similar drivel (and even produced some myself) on the phone—an important technology if there ever was one.

The key question today isn't what's dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with bite-size messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary. Here's why I'm looking. In the last few months, the traffic on Twitter has exploded, growing far beyond its circles of bleeding-edge tech enthusiasts and hard-core social networkers.


more ...


http://quotably.com/

http://summize.com/

http://twittervision.com/
http://firehose.stamen.com/
http://twistori.com/

http://www.crazybob.org/twubble/
http://www.twitterlocal.net/
http://www.twitterholic.com/

http://blog.twitter.com/2007/09/tracking-twitter.html
http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/how-replies-work-on-twitter-and-how.html

http://www.twhirl.org/
http://www.google.com/talk/

http://friendfeed.com/

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Friday 16 May 2008

Gwap - Games that help the machine learn



When you play a game at Gwap, you aren't just having fun. You're helping the world become a better place. By playing our games, you're training computers to solve problems for humans all over the world.

http://www.gwap.com/gwap/about/

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Thursday 15 May 2008

Steve Gillmor understands the power of Twitter - do you?

At its simplest (its true power) Twitter is a phone switch for routing information flow. Those who control the flow control the price for the information. In a virtualized platform, the hardware is the razor and the software switch is the blades. The software switch is an affinity-based construct that manages the signal-to-noise ratio of the information flow based on the contouring signals (gestures) of the members of the group. In the language of Twitter, it’s who you follow times what you track divided by how you filter.

The trick is squeezing the firehose down into multiplexed channels across the blood brain barrier and then expanding them as they flood the brain and its synaptic map. The architecture of swarms has unique characteristics that we are seeing modeled in the contortions of Friendfeed, Facebook Connect, Ustream chatrooms, Google Reader Notes, Disqus, and the rest of what Marc Canter calls the open mesh. It goes beyond bootstrapping, harnessing the brain’s ability to add the gut instinct of survivability to the equation of what choices can be made about information triage.

more ...

http://gillmorgang.techcrunch.com/


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Tuesday 13 May 2008

BBC Radio1 - augmenting reality



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Monday 12 May 2008

Learning in 1999 A.D. (1967)



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Sunday 11 May 2008

eSN TechWatch: Low-cost Laptops

Inspired by the One Laptop Per Child initiative, a host of other scaled-down, cheaper laptops aimed primarily at students has emerged. Plus, Birmingham, Alabama, becomes the first U.S. city to buy low-cost laptops from OLPC.



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Thursday 8 May 2008

More details of LEGO MMO



Lego Universe will blend real-world style environments with characters and buildings made of digital plastic pieces. A forest would have less bricks in the background, while a city would lend itself to being made nearly entirely with bricks.

Each player's avatar, or online persona, will be a customizable digital version of Lego minifigures, the tiny characters included with most Lego kits that also feature in existing Lego video games such as Lego Star Wars.

That's not surprising. Lego employees are just as likely to pull out a Lego figure of themselves, with name, phone number and e-mail address rather than a traditional business card.

Lego Universe will initially launch as a PC game, available in stores or as a download, and may eventually be available on other gaming platforms. It will operate as a pay-as-you-go subscription service at a "competitive price", Hansen said.

more ...

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World Of CEO-craft



The best sign that someone’s qualified to run an Internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status, according to the latest issue of Harvard Business Review.


“Leadership’s Online Labs” by Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone, and Tony O’Driscoll is based on the authors’ research into the leadership and management skills required by fantasy/sci-fi MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Eve Online. In those multiplayer games, the hardest-to-achieve goals (such as killing the demi-god dragon, wiping out a competing space corporation, and so on) often require dozens or even hundreds of players working together in concert, so the skills required to lead a successful mission, the authors argue, are very much like those needed to run a profitable business.

more ...

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Monday 5 May 2008

Pursuing the Next Level of Artificial Intelligence



Like a good gambler, Daphne Koller, a researcher at Stanford whose work has led to advances in artificial intelligence, sees the world as a web of probabilities.

There is, however, nothing uncertain about her impact.

A mathematical theoretician, she has made contributions in areas like robotics and biology. Her biggest accomplishment — and at age 39, she is expected to make more — is creating a set of computational tools for artificial intelligence that can be used by scientists and engineers to do things like predict traffic jams, improve machine vision and understand the way cancer spreads.

more ...

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Thursday 1 May 2008

Interview with Ben Sawyer, Games for Health Project

Jack Olmsted, Seattle PI Reader Blog – Videoblogging 206 – podcast, talks with Ben Sawyer, co-director of the Games for Health Fourth Annual Conference that will be held May 8-9 at the Baltimore Convention Center.

About Games for Health The Games for Health Project is produced by the Serious Games Initiative, a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars effort that applies cutting-edge games and game technologies to a range of public and private policy, leadership and management issues. The project also produces the Games for Health Conference, now in its fourth year.



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