In April a helicopter crashed into a Nissan (nasdaq: NSANY - news - people ) building, starting a fire that left a couple of dead bodies. The explosion took place on Altima Island in Second Life, a Web fantasy world where users create customized, cartoonlike characters called avatars. The crash, whether an accident or an intentional prank, wasn't exactly an image-enhancing moment for a carmaker. Nissan's online reps cleaned up the virtual mess, coffins and all.
Marketers have flocked to Second Life since it went live in 2003. Coca-Cola (nyse: KO - news - people ), H&R Block (nyse: HRB - news - people ), IBM and Toyota (nyse: TM - news - people ) are among 80 companies that have set up a virtual presence there to capture eyeballs--Second Life boasts a population of 7.1 million registered users--and experiment with online branding. It's cheap: Linden Lab, the site's creator, charges $1,675 plus $295 a month to occupy an island. Visitors pay nothing.
But this leasehold doesn't fence out troublemakers. It turns out that avatars seem more interested in having sex and hatching pranks than spending time warming up to real-world brands. "There is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid," blogged David Churbuck, Web-marketing vice president for computer maker Lenovo. (Lenovo isn't represented on Second Life.)
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Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Second Life's virtual Web world can be a weird, chancy place for real-life brands.
Monday, 30 July 2007
Comparing 2D and 3D Synchronous Learning
http://karlkapp.blogspot.com/2007/07/comparing-2d-and-3d-synchronous.html
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Game worlds show their human side
World of Warcraft and Second Life are proving a boon to social scientists who are using them as virtual laboratories.
Researchers are getting insights into real life by studying what people do in virtual worlds, reveals a review in the journal Science.
It suggests virtual worlds could help scientists studying ideas of government and even concepts of self.
Others are looking at behaviours peculiar to online worlds and how they differ from real life.
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Two New Virtual “Worlds” For Kids
With the success of Nicktropolis and even more so WebKinz, Club Penguin, and things like GoPets and more (Animal Crossing, anyone?), virtual worlds for kids have become the hot ticket this summer. Two new ones are on their way: one an educational 3D theme park, the other a cool 2D “world” designed in part by Aardman Animations, the outfit behind the excellent Wallace & Gromit cartoons.
The Aardman offering is known as WebbliWorld, and is populated by all kinds of avatars and features beginning for the most part with W- or Webbli-. That’s WebbliWallace above, the avatar I created by sticking together the bits and pieces on offer. Not really an immersive multiuser world, as far as I can tell, WebbliWorld instead offers a range of Flash games and activities designed to educate young ‘uns and inspire them to take on real-world activities like sports or mucking about in the garden. You can view other Webblis profiles, but communication seems limited.
One cool thing about WebbliWorld is that it functions as a junior social network, letting kids build out their WebbliStaks with links to bands, books, and movies that they like. “All content that is added to WebbliWorld by users is moderated by an external, specialist moderation company and by the staff of WebbliWorld,” according to the WebbliWorld parents’ page.
Designed for kids in kindergarten to second grade, JumpStartWorld also seems to lack a multiuser component, but does feature a “3D theme park” that’s also meant to be educational, and that includes a “curriculum based on national and state standards.” Kids’ experiences can be personalized by parents, and kids are drawn through the world via a “mission-based reward system” designed to teach “core math, reading and critical thinking skills.” In addition, “a cutting-edge adaptive learning system responds, offering new adventures based on [kids’] individual achievements.”
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Thursday, 26 July 2007
How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life
For months, Michael Donnelly had been hearing all about the fantastic opportunities in Second Life.
As worldwide head of interactive marketing at Coca-Cola, Donnelly was fascinated by its commercial potential, the way its users could wander through a computer-generated 3-D environment that mimics the mundane world of the flesh. So one day last fall, he downloaded the Second Life software, created an avatar, and set off in search of other brands like his own. American Apparel, Reebok, Scion — the big ones were easy to find, yet something felt wrong: "There was nobody else around." He teleported over to the Aloft Hotel, a virtual prototype for a real-world chain being developed by the owners of the W. It was deserted, almost creepy. "I felt like I was in The Shining."
Yet Donnelly decided to put money into Second Life anyway. He's no digital naïf: When he joined Coke last summer, the company was being ridiculed for its huffy response to a spate of Web videos showing the soda geysers that erupt when you drop Mentos into Diet Coke. Within weeks, Donnelly had Coke and Mentos sponsoring a contest on Google Video that's gotten more than 5.6 million views. But Second Life was different. "Many places you go, there's still nobody there," he concedes. That's certainly the case with Coke's Virtual Thirst pavilion, where you can long linger without encountering another avatar. "But my job is to invest in things that have never been done before. So Second Life was an obvious decision."
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-08/ff_sheep#
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London Games Festival 2007
22 – 26 October 2007 sees the second London Games Festival for consumers and trade. Many changes to the structure and management of the Festival have taken place since last year, making it easier to get involved and offering more PR and consumer-focused opportunities to participants.
Key targets for the Festival are to create positive engaging events across the capital, to encourage mainstream media attention, stimulate consumer discussion and aid businesses.
The Festival programme will include a series of diverse events from the world of interactive entertainment. Video games publishers, developers, partners, personalities, trade organisations, media organisations and individuals will all be involved in the week-long celebrations. The LGF will provide the industry with the opportunity to showcase creativity and artistry, from script-writers to animators, musicians to programmers. To put games industry careers at the top of wish-lists and to celebrate players in an inclusive way that embraces all demographics.
The Festival also aims to enhance perception of interactive entertainment and the industry by engaging with existing institutional advocates (BAFTA, DfES, DCMS, BBFC, DTI, LDA) and illustrating compelling and positive research while promoting future vision and horizons of the games industry.
Alongside the week of media and/or consumer-facing events will be a number of B2B events organised by the industry’s trade bodies and other organisations.
http://www.londongamesfestival.co.uk/
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Virtual Worlds Forum Europe - Registration Now Open
Europe’s first pan-European virtual worlds conference will create a genuine meeting place for brands and corporations, virtual worlds and the converging games, entertainment and business spaces.
This two day conference and exhibition covers both public and private virtual worlds. The conversation will range from how brands can engage with consumers in virtual worlds and on the 3D web for commercial and brand advantage, to harnessing the power of corporate collaboration and private virtual worlds. Register now at the Early Bird price - you've only got till August 1st.
http://virtualworldsforum.com/
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Wednesday, 25 July 2007
UI Design Newsletter - On using simulation experiences to encourage desired behavior
Over the past 40+ years, much energy has gone into understanding whether exposure to violent media (TV, movies, video games) makes people more accepting of violence – and possibly even more violent. The concern exploded with violent TV. Could watching violent movies/shows make people more aggressive? Would seeing violence as a response:
teach viewers new strategies?
make violence more common and familiar?
make it seem like an OK – or even desirable – way to react?
First-person shooter games (e.g., Doom, Quake, Half-life, Ravin' Rabbit), where players perform actions rather than watch them, has fueled this debate. Can making a decision once or executing a maneuver in a virtual environment make it easier to do so in real life?
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Tuesday, 24 July 2007
Some Foundations for Second Life Pedagogy
Sex, commerce and stalking. In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns. Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS! It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses. And stalking is a bad thing, of course...
I did not share these concerns about Second Life. In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).
Being a design-minded individual, my attention was more captivated by the unique pedagogical opportunities and challenges posed by the Second Life medium. We were lucky enough to have Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins visit our campus to give a presentation on educational uses of Second Life. She described a lesson she designed on self-presentation and identity (or so I recall, I forget exactly how she herself positioned the lesson) where students had to choose bodies from a box or treasure-trunk, don them, and go out and interact in Second Life in those bodies. One group of students chose to go out as Kool-Aid men, and they went to a bar, where they bumped into people, angered them, got marginalized, tried to hide, sought solidarity with each other, and in general behaved like members of a visually conspicuous minority group. They returned to the home island a very short time after venturing out, having learned an enormous amount about size issues, discrimination and minority identities.
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Newsweek - Inside Second Life
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Media Pendulum Swings On Second Life
Yeah, the media's honeymoon with Second Life is clearly over. Time mag has listed it among five worst sites to avoid: "We're sure that somebody out there is enjoying Second Life, but why? You interact in the space through an avatar, but creating and personalizing this animated representation of yourself is tedious. Movements feel clunky and there can be a terrible lag."
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Monday, 23 July 2007
computer games: playing to learn
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LEARNING WITH VISUALIZATIONS
Electronic screens are rapidly displacing the printed page because we humans are attracted to and engaged more deeply by information that is pictorial, interactive, and in motion.
This means that as educators we must consider how computerized and animated "visualizations" will mediate much, if not most, of the information we consume in the future.
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Belonging In Games
The Belonging Initiative, in collaboration with Aitken Leadership Group, is supporting the development of games that are fun and accessible for everyone, games that take play beyond computers and into the spaces around us, games that require people working together. BIG stands for Belonging In Games. We are hosting a competition to see who can invent the best BIG game.
We are inviting everybody we know. The kids rolling down the sidewalks, moms and daughters, directors of non-profits, disaffected Emily Carr grads, and you. This is grass-roots game design, a competition for non-gaming-professionals, whose game
experience may be limited to bouts of Tag or Snakes-and-Ladders.
We want you to enter this competition. You can win a little money and considerable acclaim, and help us fight isolation at the same time.
BIG games are fun, accessible games that include play in the ‘real world’ and interaction with other people. BIG games are definitely not solo, computer-only adventures. They are playable across urban landscapes, in real time, with real people, who may or may not have super-abilities.
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Making Games Project
In Creating the Future the Computer Games Skills Forum recommended that programs such as the Instiute of Education's Making Games project be supported wherever possible.
The Making Games project is developing tools based on computer games to enable school students to learn the 'literacy of games and mechanics of construction', whilst developing their problem solving, value judegment, negotiating and decision making skills.
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Thursday, 19 July 2007
Ben Sawyer Talks About Serious Games at E3
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Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Iran's New Game: `Rescue Nuke Scientist'
An Iranian hard-line student group unveiled a new video game Monday that simulates an attempt to rescue two Iranian nuclear experts kidnapped by the U.S. military and held in Iraq and Israel.
The "Rescue the Nuke Scientist" video game, designed by the Union of Students Islamic Association, was described by its creators as a response to a U.S.-based company's "Assault on Iran" game, which depicts an American attack on an Iranian nuclear facility.
Next thing you know they'll be playing crownbingo with land mines....
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Companies look for real benefits from the virtual world
Where people congregate, business is usually never far behind and as an increasing number of internet users explore the opportunities for social interaction, play and even money-making provided by online virtual worlds, business is getting in on the act.
Whether it is by using environments such as Second Life to sell digital versions of real-world goods, setting up branded worlds to increase customer loyalty or using private online universes to communicate better with their own employees, companies are experimenting with alternative digital realities.
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Second Life Entertainment Study Released: SL Accounts for More Time Than All Other Forms of Entertainment Combined
According to the newly released Market Truths research study, Second Life Entertainment Market, 80% of avatar time in Second Life is spent on entertainment activities, totaling just over 16 hours per week – more than all other forms of their real life entertainment combined. According to the study, the median time spent on other forms of computer-related entertainment is just 4 hours per week, and 10 hours per week for non computer-related entertainment.
Among other things, the study examines the linkages between RL entertainment behaviors and preferences and those same behaviors and preferences in SL. It includes notes on both SL and RL age and gender differences, as well as commentary on RL geographic preferences for entertainment activities in SL and RL.
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Programming with Alice at Carnegie Mellon
In continuing our ongoing discussion of teaching kids programming skills by having them design their own computer games, Kathy Larason suggested I take a look at Alice over at Carnegie Mellon.
Alice is an introductory 3-D programming language that focuses on animation objects. The graphics are interactive, and could be constructed as games or animations. The main code and accompanying documentation are housed at alice.org.
Alice is a major endeavor. Four textbooks on programming with Alice were published in 2006; one in 2007; and at least one more is slated for 2008. Workshops are ongoing this summer, including sites at Carnegie Mellon, Roger Williams University, and Georgia Tech.
Alice has been widely adopted in schools and colleges. In a PowerPoint presentation led by Dennis Cosgrove, Caitlin Kelleher and others at ACM SIGCSE 2007 earlier this year, several statistics were given. The main site has had some 3.5 million page views, and almost half a million downloads of the program have occurred over the past year. About 250 colleges and universities are using Alice to teach programming.
Alice has a serious agenda. Computer Science majors continue to decline in numbers, and there are numerous ongoing efforts to interest girls and women in programming as well as math and the hard sciences. Researchers being as they are, several studies of Alice and its effect on this serious agenda are ongoing. One study of initial Computer Science class takers at Ithaca College and St. Joseph University showed a jump in grade averages (from C to B) and a large jump in willingness to take the second semester of Computer Science when participants were exposed to Alice prior to taking the class.
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Programming with Alice at Carnegie Mellon
In continuing our ongoing discussion of teaching kids programming skills by having them design their own computer games, Kathy Larason suggested I take a look at Alice over at Carnegie Mellon.
Alice is an introductory 3-D programming language that focuses on animation objects. The graphics are interactive, and could be constructed as games or animations. The main code and accompanying documentation are housed at alice.org.
Alice is a major endeavor. Four textbooks on programming with Alice were published in 2006; one in 2007; and at least one more is slated for 2008. Workshops are ongoing this summer, including sites at Carnegie Mellon, Roger Williams University, and Georgia Tech.
Alice has been widely adopted in schools and colleges. In a PowerPoint presentation led by Dennis Cosgrove, Caitlin Kelleher and others at ACM SIGCSE 2007 earlier this year, several statistics were given. The main site has had some 3.5 million page views, and almost half a million downloads of the program have occurred over the past year. About 250 colleges and universities are using Alice to teach programming.
Alice has a serious agenda. Computer Science majors continue to decline in numbers, and there are numerous ongoing efforts to interest girls and women in programming as well as math and the hard sciences. Researchers being as they are, several studies of Alice and its effect on this serious agenda are ongoing. One study of initial Computer Science class takers at Ithaca College and St. Joseph University showed a jump in grade averages (from C to B) and a large jump in willingness to take the second semester of Computer Science when participants were exposed to Alice prior to taking the class.
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Gaming your way to the oil rigs
An Edmonton-based software company hopes to improve safety conditions on oil rigs through their “hands-on, off-site” training game.
Simulynx Rig Skill, a simulation-based rig crew training system, was developed by Terris-Hill Productions, a local company headed by Terry Smith and Kevin McNulty.
McNulty said the project started as a response to the frustration both he and Smith felt with the efficacy of existing training programs and their desire to improve upon them.
Simulynx Rig Skill in action. (Video supplied)
In Simulynx, the player takes on the role of a service rig worker – in the version available, it is the junior floorhand position – and in first person perspective, completes real-life tasks in a 3-D environment.
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Tuesday, 17 July 2007
The Next Big Thing: Why Web 2.0 Isn’t Enough
It’s easy to spot revolutions or major events in the past. The shrinking of computer parts in the 70s, the PC revolution of the 80s that led to the Internet explosion of the 90s, etc. At the beginning of the new millennium, we had at our fingertips millions of pages of information. It wasn’t a question of ‘is it out there somewhere’, it was a question of ‘it’s out there, how do I find it?’
Enter Google. Google wasn’t the first search engine, nor was it the last, but it quickly became THE search engine because they did something different. Google created a search engine that took all of that information and made it useful and relevant. They did it not by teaching the machine to do it, but instead by teaching the machine to observe what we humans were linking to. By tapping into the social side of information, Google quickly became the best search engine for finding the information in the sea of content.
So the latest ‘big thing’ has been the socializing of the Internet. We now find sites like Digg, reddit, Del.icio.us, etc. that help us wade through all the rough to find the diamond. The buzz word surrounding all of this has been ‘Web 2.0′. This socializing has gone a long way to making sense of it all, but is there more? What is the next big thing?
Realtors have been giving us the answer for years, although they didn’t know it. The next big thing is…’location, location, location’.
Think of how we access all the information of the Internet. We do it at a desk where wires keep us attached to a specific location. Laptops help us branch out a bit, but even then we are tied to a wireless connection. Go too far and you no longer have access to information.
Mobile devices have begun to allow us to take this information with us, but we are still stuck in an old paradigm. If I am standing in the Madrid, Spain train station, there is a good chance I want to ride a train somewhere. But when I connect to the Internet on my mobile device, I’m stuck finding information the old way: through keywords. Somewhere out there is information that would help me, but all I have our my not-as-useful keywords.
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Video games put immigration debate in play
The video game plays like this: You are a Mexican illegal immigrant, an Indian green-card holder or a student on a visa from Japan.
As you navigate through New York City, you make risky decisions along the way. At a subway turnstile, do you jump or swipe your card? At a corner store, do you pay or shoplift? If you make bad choices and lose points, you can win others by attending immigration rallies or taking English classes.
But watch out: If an immigration agent pops onto the screen, you go straight to a detention center and face possible deportation. You’ve been “ICED” — a twist on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws.
As the national debate over immigration continues, advocacy groups are trying a new medium — video games — to promote their agenda and influence public opinion.
ICED, for example, was produced by Breakthrough, a New York-based human-rights organization, to highlight the arbitrary nature of immigration laws.
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Coldwell Banker - looking out for the newbies
Coldwell Banker - looking out for the newbies. US-based real estate company Coldwell Banker is using Second Life as a way not only to position its brand in a virtual world but also offer a service dedicated to the residents living in it - virtual land services.
The company has bought major tranches of land in SL and is making it available (for buy or rent). The important aspect here though is the fact that they are offering the land at below market value. A good move? Well, land is a backbone to the economy in Second Life and is often very difficult to obtain, so this service is extremely useful for people wanting property in SL and at the same time positions the Coldwell Banker brand positively. So yes, a good move.
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Teachers create video games for classroom use
CARBONDALE - Brian Murley's approach to teaching math to his students is a far cry from the abacus.
"This is Lord Nasher," Murley said, pointing to the computer screen where a medieval figure was positioned in a room with another man dressed in armor.
Students at Giant City School, where Murley teaches math to sixth- through eighth-graders, are obviously familiar with video games, but the one Murley was playing on Friday afternoon had one substantial difference: He created it himself.
Murley is a graduate student of Christian Sebastian Loh, assistant professor and coordinator of the instructional Design and Technology's Collaboratory for Interactive Learning Research at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Loh has been teaching a summer game-modification class that allows students to create their own version of popular computer game Neverwinter Nights.
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Monday, 16 July 2007
Nintendo breaks out of the living room and into the classroom
In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, reporter Yuri Iwatani Kane writes about the use of DS's for education in Kyoto's Yawata school district. The students use them to learn English handwriting, with software written by IE Institute, a Japanese educational-software maker.
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Games, Learning & Society 3.0
In his opening keynote at the Game, Learning & Society 3.0 conference in Madison, WI last week, Professor James Gee set the stage for the year’s most substantive conference on learning games and simulations. Among other points made in his opening remarks, Gee reminded us that:
> Pop culture — the game business in particular — has learned to profit from stuff we can’t get kids to do in school.
> When it comes to reading highly technical game documentation there are no differences in achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged kids. The motivation of _fun_ is so powerful.
> In MMORPGs and similar online games, success demands leading or participating in cross-functional teams and gamers willingly join them, yet in business settings the thought of participating in a cross-functional team is often a major cause of stress.
> Playing (video) games situates meaning to words and symbols in game texts, encouraging performance before competency — just the opposite of the dominant pedagogy in today’s schools that typically stresses being able to recite facts (i.e. pass the test) before demonstrating competence in a particular domain.
> The gamers attitude to failure is “fail early, fail often” if it is in the service of learning something critical to success.
> Games are problem-solving spaces that cultivate a culture of learning and learning complexity is a drug that humans can’t get enough of.
> Games are also “rule systems” and gamers seek ways to game the system, to leverage the rules of the game to their advantage, and game developers can design for this.
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'In class, I have to power down'
Children have been quick to grasp the joys of new technology. Why are schools lagging so far behind, ask David Puttnam
At a recent digital education conference in San Francisco, one of the more memorable remarks quoted came from a child: "Whenever I go into class, I have to power down." That roughly translates as: "What I do with digital technology outside school - at home, in my own free time - is on a completely different level to what I'm able to do at school. Outside school, I'm using much more advanced skills, doing many more interesting things, operating in a far more sophisticated way. School takes little notice of this and seems not to care."
It is a sentiment that might (and should) shock educators, but one that an increasing majority of today's kids would understand and agree with. I have already tried it out on one 12-year-old of my acquaintance. It's a no-brainer, in his view.
"At school, you do all this boring stuff, really basic stuff, PowerPoint and spreadsheets and things. It only gets interesting and exciting when you come home and really use your computer. You're free, you're in control, it's your own world."
Most kids probably cannot tell you whether they are actually learning anything from that freedom and control, from the hours spent playing computer games, joining in chat forums and (for the more adventurous) setting up websites. But isn't that where the education system should take over and work out what the golden nuggets of learning might be?
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Virtual marketers have second thoughts about Second Life
SECOND LIFE — a three-dimensional online society where publicity is cheap and the demographic is edgy and certainly computer-savvy — should be a marketer's paradise.
But it turns out that plugging products is as problematic in the virtual world as it is anywhere else.
At http://www.secondlife.com — where the cost is $6 a month for premium citizenship — shopping, at least for real-world products, isn't a main activity. Four years after Second Life debuted, some marketers are second-guessing the money and time they've put into it.
"There's not a compelling reason to stay," said Brian McGuinness, vice president of Aloft, a brand of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. that is closing its Second Life shop and donating its virtual land to the nonprofit social-networking group TakingITGlobal.
Linden Lab, the San Francisco firm that created Second Life, sells companies and people pieces of the landscape where they can build stores, conference halls and gardens. Individuals create avatars, or virtual representations of themselves, that travel around this online society, exploring and schmoozing with other avatars. Land developed by users, rather than real-world companies, is among the most popular places in Second Life.
But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.'s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.
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Sunday, 15 July 2007
Can the 'serious games' being developed at Georgia Tech be a force for good?
IAN BOGOST, 30, confesses that he has 11 video-game consoles hooked up to his TV at his Decatur home.
An assistant professor at Tech's School of Literature Communication and Culture, he also is the co-founder of the intown studio Persuasive Games, where he develops games and helps define the cutting edge of a new movement in the industry. His work is lauded by fellow gaming scholars, who call it groundbreaking. "Ian has a rigorous critical attitude and it comes across in his games," says Tracy Fullerton, co-director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab. "But they also have his dry sense of humor. They're very ironic."
Since 2002, he's meshed the unlikely worlds of academia and gaming to produce "serious games" – video games that aren't just for entertainment, but deal with real-world political and social issues.
"Video games are doing more things, creating more kinds of responses and reaching more kinds of people," Bogost says. "People are having experiences and reactions that are meaningful."
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serious games
PS3 Little Big Planet - Co-op Multiplayer Side-scrolling Platformer
Looks like this could be used as a ludo-educational game with young children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LittleBigPlanet
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Saturday, 14 July 2007
Augmented Reality - Kung Fu
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Eye of Judgement - Augmented Reality PS3 Game
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New Augmented Reality Videos From Total Immersion
http://www.youtube.com/user/EmmanuelMFr
http://www.t-immersion.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/
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State of Play V: Building the Global Metaverse, August 19-22, 2007 Singapore.
When there is a conference on 'virtual worlds' every week ? How do you choose which to go to ?
http://www.nyls.edu/pages/2396.asp
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Friday, 13 July 2007
Serious Games Institute (SGI), Coventry: News Update
David Wortley has sent himself back to Coventry from San Francisco, via Heathrow airport. In the virtual world, his specialist subject, this journey would have been a comparatively short one compared with, say, the possibilities of travelling between galaxies at the flick of a finger. But he has been travelling for umpteen hours through many time zones in the real world.
"David is a bit of a Superman," says his colleague Sara de Freitas, while Wortley, director of the Serious Games Institute (SGI), goes off in search of coffee. We are at Coventry University's technology park, on a site where over the last century, cycles, motorbikes and cars have been built.
more ...
profile: Dr Sara de Freitas
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E3 07: Serious Games maintains a straight face
SANTA MONICA, Calif.--Admist the (admittedly rather subdued) craziness of E3, which included free vodka shots, Wii Fit, and people wandering around dressed as roosters, one organisation was sitting quietly in the corner trying to be serious.
The Serious Games Initiative were those people, and it has been slowly getting more and more visible over the past few years, and is present at E3 to try to put out its messages that games can not only be fun, they can be useful too.
A variety of titles and companies were crammed into the Initiative's floor space at the E3. One of those, Persuasive Games had a variety of titles on show, including Presidential Pong, which caught GameSpot's attention back in June. The Atlanta-based company is not just a one-trick pony, however, and they had an array of other serious-message-but-fun-to-play titles on display.
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Workshop: Learning and Research in Second Life
Call for Papers/Participation
Please join us in a workshop on learning and research in Second Life on October 17, 2007 in Vancouver at Internet Research 8.0 (http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?title=About_IR8.0 )
Paper Deadline August 15th.
Second Life(R) is a 3d virtual environment created by Linden Lab which has captured the attentions of researchers and teachers from around the world from a variety of disciplines.
This workshop aims to improve the understanding of Second Life as a Learning and Research environment. It will bring 35 researchers together to collaborate, discuss and workshop diverse topics related to research and learning in Second Life. We will pursue a full-day schedule in which participants will discuss their work and interests on four different topics: learning in Second Life, integrated learning, the contributions of research to the community and ethical
research methods. How can we better enable learning in this sphere? How can we better enable research?
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Wii Fit Skateboard, Snowboard, Surfboard - New Exergames ?
The most exciting revelation at Nintendo’s E3 Media Briefing this year was the Wii Fit. A new peripheral that is able to sense where a person is stepping. Nintendo showed off the possibilities of doing exercises and fun mini-games by using this “stepping platform”.
What Nintendo now presents is yet another merge between the arcade and the home console. Imagine using the Wii Fit, not as a excercise platform but as a skateboard, snowboard, or surfboard! Turn the Wii Fit sideways and you’ve got a two-in-one peripheral. Sure you probably won’t be able to do crazy tricks with the board, but for people who can’t find their balance in the real sports Wii Fit is going to be a fun alternative.
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Thursday, 12 July 2007
The Digital Knowledge Exchange
The Digital Knowledge Exchange is a joint collaboration between two of the region's leading universities – Teesside and Sunderland. The initiative offers your business access to our specialist research groups and experts in the following areas:
Web Services
Web Accessibility
Serious Games & Animation
Usability Design and Testing
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Business Simulations - Do They Have A Place In Training?
The use of simulation learning tools to educate employees is growing rapidly due to the decisive success rates of their targeted commercial content. Increasingly they are teaching management teams improved business acumen and decision making in a risk-free real-world setting.
These simulation tools will often take two forms; either a manual business game – often requiring business decisions to be repeatedly made and providing learning measures alongside the exercise or using electronic media to provide business simulations (either fictional or realistic) dependent on the skill sets being targeted. These simulations are increasingly being referred to as ‘Serious Games’ which can sometimes be misleading; however this reflects the growing awareness of the simulation tool in the training market.
Today’s simulations should actively engage and respond to the trainee, creating an effective and lasting learning experience, reducing the resources needed to create training materials and improving the impact (and often depth) of the training budget.
more ...
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