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


Friday 6 November 2009

Farmville







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Monday 2 November 2009

makerbot





http://makerbot.com/

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Wednesday 9 September 2009

Thanks to mobile phones, augmented reality could be far more accessible—and useful—than virtual reality



VIRTUAL reality never quite lived up to the hype. In the 1990s films such as “Lawnmower Man” and “The Matrix” depicted computer-generated worlds in which people could completely immerse themselves. In some respects this technology has become widespread: think of all those video-game consoles capable of depicting vivid, photorealistic environments, for example. What is missing, however, is a convincing sense of immersion. Virtual reality (VR) doesn’t feel like reality.

One way to address this is to use fancy peripherals—gloves, helmets and so forth—to make immersion in a virtual world seem more realistic. But there is another approach: that taken by VR’s sibling, augmented reality (AR). Rather than trying to create an entirely simulated environment, AR starts with reality itself and then augments it. “In augmented reality you are overlaying digital information on top of the real world,” says Jyri Huopaniemi, director of the Nokia Research Centre in Tampere, Finland. Using a display, such as the screen of a mobile phone, you see a live view of the world around you—but with digital annotations, graphics and other information superimposed upon it.

more ...

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Zooming Interfaces for Augmented Reality



http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/making-augmented-reality-browsers-even-better-with-panoramic-and-birds-eye-zooming/


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Saturday 5 September 2009

Tuesday 25 August 2009

Pirillo on Augmented Reality



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Friday 21 August 2009

Friday 7 August 2009

Google Wave Coming to iPhone





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Friday 24 July 2009

Moon: in Google Earth



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Tuesday 7 July 2009

iPhone 3GS VS Nokia N97



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Tuesday 30 June 2009

Augmented Reality property search concept




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Augmented Reality Gaming Concept




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Thursday 11 June 2009

Palm Pre Review



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Monday 8 June 2009

Madden NFL 10

This Summer get ready for the title in the EA Madden franchise. Madden NFL 10 will be released on all platforms !



Simulation will be key to this years title, EA plans on scaling back the arcadey feel of past iterations. For example instead of the AI using the same plays, the new adaptive AI will allow the computer to adjust their style of play mid game to stop you in action. The AI will be able to follow the quarterbacks eyes to stop his passes. This awareness carries over to the offensive side as well. Quarterbacks physically turn their heads to their receivers. On top of all that you will be able to drag defenders, battle for loose balls and drag defenders as you push for first down yardage.

Madden NFL 10 Trailer:



There is only one thing football fans love more then, cold beer, super bowl chicken wings and NFL betting and that is Madden !

Madden NFL 10 Unique Wii Style:



EA sports games have the things true fanatics look for to make them feel closer to the real deal. If you enjoy sports betting, you can bet you friends that this title will be packed with the most details out of any football game on the shelf this year.

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Sunday 7 June 2009

Cloud Gaming



Physical media and dedicated gaming consoles, we are told, have a rather bleak future. And the prime suspect for their demise is “The Cloud”. Guest blogger Jason Collins from Game Hub has a look at what The Cloud is and how this is likely to change gaming from both an entertainment and a 'serious games' perspective.

The Cloud is already important to most of our daily lives. Every time you access your Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail via a web browser, you're accessing, retrieving and interacting with your emails stored in The Cloud. Most internet users have also interacted with The Cloud when using Google Docs in which your docs, spreadsheets, presentations are edited online without ever being saved or used on your PC itself. The analogy of “The Cloud” is the place in which the files that you view and use online are stored and means not only do we save our hard drives from the abuse of saving thousands of emails and documents, but also that we can access them anywhere on the world, from any computer.

Looking specifically at the gaming industry, Cloud Gaming is set to cause the biggest shake up of the way we play games since the early 1970's when the first dedicated gaming consoles hit the shelves. The “Cloud Gaming” generation will not own physical media nor will they store video games on a hardrive. Rather they'll connect via the internet to central servers, on which the games are stored and the processing required to run them will take place. With all of the processing and media storage happening remotely, the only hardware the user will require is a box to coordinate the flow of information from your controller, through the internet to their servers, and then to receive that information back and translate it onto your TV or monitor. With the industry leaders currently claiming to have all but eliminated Lag (down to 1 millisecond), the gamer's interactions with the servers through the internet is planned to be as seamless and quick as interacting with a console in the same room.

Console Gaming


Gamer > Controller > Console > TV

Cloud Gaming


Gamer > Controller > 3rd Party Box > Internet > 3rd Party Servers > Internet > 3rd Party Box > TV

Let's make a few distinctions so everyone is reading from the same page. Cloud Gaming isn't the same as Xbox Live or the PSN. These services offer the ability to connect to their services, download the games and access them locally from your own console. With Cloud Gaming you don't download anything, you access the games, software or applications that are stored remotely on servers via the web. The same goes for services like Metaboli, which lets you download PC games and play them from your hard drive . Cloud Gaming means no downloading, no hard drive; rather playing them directly from 'their' server.

If we fast-forward into the “near future” of Cloud Gaming, how exactly does it work for the household user? With all software and processing hardware stored remotely and accessed via the web, your end of the bargain comes in the form of a new box and a subscription to a service like OnLive or GaiKai, through which you access their servers, to remotely interact with their library of games. In return you have access to a plethora of new and old games and continually updated hardware capabilities as they upgrade their servers and processing power. The Cloud Gaming generation will never physically, or via a hard drive, have possession of the game itself.

GDC 09: OnLive Demo



The implications for the video games industry are nearly as long as the combined list of pro's and con's but in this instance we're interested in how these issues may change serious games, games for education and edutainment. The issues confronting the living room gamer are in many ways greater and more substantial than those that edutainment gamers face. With broadband, logistical and attitudinal factors all arguably less of an issue for professional and educational use of games, the way is open for Cloud Gaming to march forward.

Of principle importance is the removal of the hardware barrier, combined with the disappearance of the physical distribution issues of the software. Since the processing and applications are stored and accessed remotely, a participant's only requirement is a way to interact, which opens up a multitude of possibilities for delivering processor-intensive and complex software at not only regional and local level, but within the home itself. Even at a scaled down model, less complex training programmes and training games could feasibly be delivered to the living room via the internet allowing participant's to take part, learn and progress in their own time, space and at their own pace. Not only do these issues cut distribution and manufacturing costs, but delivering direct to the consumer potentially cuts out a lot of “middlemen” which at an entertainment level are the video game stores themselves, but at a training and educational level, could be regional or local training and education centres. The cost cutting involved with this may bring costs down accordingly and make educational and training programmes available to those to which they weren't previously.

Rather than replacing, and therefore re purchasing training software/games or edutainment titles, they can be upgraded, modified and improved in one central place. From the participant's point of view they will have access to new or improved titles and courses with complete ease. From the publisher's point of view they can upgrade, modify or change training games, courses and environments in one central place, which will filter down through the Cloud to the users at a minimum of cost, communication and effort, which may have otherwise prohibited improvements or modifications. Whole training games, courses or environments and syllabuses, be it for the individual or for a regional training centre, can therefore be controlled from a central place.

The Cloud and Cloud Gaming is positioned to overhaul the serious games industry at least as much as the entertainment video games sector and is something that no one in the gaming industry can ignore, be it the CEO of a games publisher or the living room gamer.

For more on Cloud Gaming and general video game news, stop by Game Hub sometime!



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Tuesday 2 June 2009

Thursday 28 May 2009

Google Wave: Next Gen Email/IM/Real-Time Collaboration App and Protocol - Founding Team Interview

Will this kill Friendfeed, email, IM and maybe even Facebook ???

In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content -- it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave to see how it evolved.

Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.







http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-ambition-can-it-fulfill-googles-grand-web-vision/



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Wednesday 27 May 2009

The World of Online Poker: Serious Game and Serious Business


Online poker is not only a serious game in many ways, but a serious business as well. Millions of players around the world take part in online poker games, with the business quickly springing up in the late 1990s and rapidly growing into a multi-billion dollar business for the companies involved.

As the Internet became widely available, applications and games sprang up that let poker fans get their poker fix online, playing free money games on a variety of websites. What took online poker from more of a casual game to a serious game, though, was the introduction of real money into the equation, which began in the late 1990s when sites like Planet Poker, Paradise Poker, and PartyPoker started offering players the chance to play online poker for real money. A poker site for US players was very easy to find, as the US market was the largest at the time, with sites springing up weekly trying to get a piece of the action.

While some players today would classify themselves as recreational players, solely looking to play poker for entertainment, the majority of online poker players are driven by a more serious desire: winning money. With that in mind, online poker has quickly been transformed, with professional players using a variety of tools to help them beat the game and extract money from less skilled players.

Today’s serious online poker player has a wide range of tools at his or her disposal, including training sites, database software that collects all of their hands and lets them analyze their own betting tendencies and flaws, and software applications that pull from mined data to graphically display how opponents have played in the past. Any entertainment they might have once gotten from the game is an afterthought, as their job instead has become finding a way to extract the most money out of the game as possible, using any and every tool at their disposal.


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Monday 4 May 2009

Can Big-Screen E-Readers Save the Newspapers ?


Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens.

Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/technology/companies/04reader.html

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Amazon uk