We’re under 48 hours before the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Early Bird ends and I wanted to push out a bit more about what we’re doing at GDC this year.
If I’ve been quiet about this – it’s mostly because I’ve been very busy with a bunch of new projects and efforts. Which is good – but not great in terms of just purely keeping up with being more active in online conversations.
So enough about being as busy as the rest of you.
What’s up with GDC this year and should you go?
NOTE: If you want to go Register before Feb 2nd to get the best pricing!!!
http://gdconf.com/attend/
Last year at Serious Games Summit we decided to “split” the day into two themed days, one was on games for health, and one was devoted to the emerging conversations on gamification.
This year GDC wanted to keep the theme approach which they thought offered some fresh approaches to the larger serious games space and recognized the growing importance of different ideas and subsectors in the space.
So this year our friends at Games for Change are programming Tuesday, and myself, Ian Bogost and Jane McGonigal were challenged to come up with something fresh and new for Monday.
After discussing a variety of ideas we landed on this notion we called “Game IT” which is a deliberate double entendre around two important trends happening in the games field, let alone serious games.
First is the trend toward games running on technology stacks that dominate our professional and personal information technology systems. As I’ve discussed for several years it’s just near impossible now to see scalable, deployed, serious game applications in commercial and non-commercial enterprises that push processing and application management out to the edge of a network where it is tough to support, secure, and integrate.
And there are a host of new tools that we use every day that we need to work with to build a new cadre of games and serious games be they social networks, mobile platforms, cloud based applications, or globally relevant platforms (think ZMQ softwares SMS/WAP games in India e.g.)
Today, even in commercial games developers are building entirely new breeds of applications across new systems like HTML5, JQuery, AWS, etc. Even the Time Magazine’s #1 game of the year is X-platform and browser compliant JAVA.
As part of this I.T. focus we also wanted to explore more keenly what enterprises really wanted to deploy at scale and how games match to the problems they have beyond just generalized notions of “training/learning”. If games are going to be strategic assets to enterprises they can’t just be held in the domain of HR but also must help with consumer engagement, R&D, employee health, and more.
The second meaning of Game IT is about it the pronoun not IT the acronym. Another key trend that we wanted to focus on is this more advanced notion of building games about more obtuse topics or situations (and I use obtuse loosely) where instead of thinking about gamification as a layer added over an existing process, we think of how do you really redefine applications and experiences relative to enterprises big, small, and personal, where there is something truly novel created and not just accented. A great example here is Fold.It and there are a number of people bravely trying to redefine what games are and how they also mash together with the incredible rise of new forms of tools, and collaborative systems.
Taken together, Game IT is an effort to look at efforts that are redefining what we’re making, and how we’re making games that foster new ways to live, work, and play.
It took a while to put together the program because we wanted to be really careful to find things that we thought fit the core ideas of what we define Game IT while also finding things that will stretch our sensibilities even further.
Here’s what you will see and learn about if you come to Game IT on Monday March 5 at GDC:
Game Structured Hiveminds: Organizing People & Solving Problems with Fun
The opening set of talks at Game IT focuses on the ability for games to help solve problems through organizing and engaging collaborative groups of people through gameplay and social networks. The opportunities happening here are still emergent but already several projects have exemplified the power of this opportunity. This set of talks seeks to further these discussions and offer exciting new ideas to game-based crowdsourcing, collaboration, and distributed activity and problem solving.
Phylo, a McGill University based project creating a human-based computing framework applying “crowd sourcing” techniques and casual style gameplay to help with comparison of the human genome with the DNA of other species essential to deciphering our genetic code and revealing the causes of various genetic disorders.
CEML (Coordinating Event Module Launguage) an innovative new scripting language for coordinating group dynamics, and civic logistics across multiple platforms and applications. Developed by Citizen’s Logistics CEML can be used to create exciting new blends of human action and game interaction.
Project Augur, developed by students at Carnegie Melon University’s Entertainment Technology Center for Lockheed Martin Corporation. Project Augur’s goal was to explore the frontiers of artificial intelligence as a predictive mechanism. Through the use of crowd-sourcing through Amazon Mechanical Turk, and with a trio of gamelike prototypes that collect data, the team built artificial intelligence algorithms that can predict based not only on an individual’s past play, but other, less obvious factors as well.
Commentary: These are all very interesting efforts deploying into the field now and will help you see things beyond the beloved example of Fold.It
Applying Game and Social Mechanics to Sustainable Fashion: Closet Swap Case Study
This presentation will look at the application of social and game mechanics in a sustainable fashion app Closet Swap – an online fashion community for teens to swap clothes with their friends. Closet Swap applies a game and social layer to the real world of fashion. It is a must-have fashion app that influences behavior in a natural way – by celebrating personal style over disposable fashion and getting users to swap, not shop. This talk will look at the design process, audience research and testing and how game and social mechanics were employed to create an experience that is entertaining and authentic to achieve its goal.
This presentation will include how Inensu combined entertainment, education and design techniques to understand and resonate with the target audience. How social game developers can work with sustainability experts to create an authentic ‘gamified’ fashion app.
Commentary: Paulina Bozek, who is the creator of Closet Swap is a well known producer formerly with Sony’s London Studio and help create Sing Star. Game IT isn’t just about “staid” corporate apps but about the larger opportunities to build games that are compatible at scale to incredible consumer engagement systems be they for new forms of entertainment or an enterprise goal.
Making Games as Fast as You Can Think of Them
One of the greatest challenges for making and using games in the enterprise is creating games in the first place. Games are not only complex and expensive, but the tools created by the “traditional” game industry for making them may not match the uses or authoring needs of other sorts of industries. In particular, current methods for making games rely on authoring behaviors and mechanics, which is still an expertise native to game development.
This talk presents a new game authoring tool that creates small, simple games in seconds based on a concept-map based authoring paradigm and a game generation artificial intelligence. The system was created to service journalists and the news media (thanks to funding from the Knight Foundation), but it can also be used in other sectors–or just as an inspiration for thinking about how to make new game authoring tools.
Identifying strategies to help organizations drive down the costs of producing useful games is a critical need to achieve improved the promise of games for organizations big and small. Attendees to this session will come away with a better understanding of the issues involved with making truly quick and easy game development tools.
Commentary: If we’re going to see games become a new form of intra-enterprise dialogue, or brainstorming tool, or new form of consumer engagement we need to think about how you remove the barrier between, desire to express, idea, and actually building something. Come see how Ian and others are tackling this tough idea.
Entertaining the Enterprise: Helping You Level Up & Conquer Work
Making work fun sounds great in concept, but the reality isn’t so casual. Three inspirational case studies come together to provide a set of talks that shed light on how games can be used for training, social networks and productivity, for individuals and businesses alike.
Ribbon Hero 2 is the Office Labs effort to turn Microsoft’s bestselling Office suite into a learning game. In the game, players hop on board Clippy’s stolen time machine and explore different time periods, playing challenges in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote in order to advance to the next level. Hear how the game was conceived, how the team responded to critical user feedback from the original version to “make it more like a game,” and core takeaways as it relates to building a game into productivity software.
IBM Research explores opportunities for game developers seeking to make a new breed of game experiences ready for corporations. Not only will we explore how we see the overall landscape evolving, but using examples from two experimental games developed for accessible browser-based technologies we will document a specific case using games to improve the uptake of a new social network application for collaboration and planning.
Baydin is changing the way you feel about email. Hear how a day spent avoiding email (and playing Total War instead!) turned into the spark that lead to a game that helps people helps you get to the bottom of their own email dungeon. By using subtler, more abstract game experiences that supplant points and badges as the primary tools The Email Game has become one of the fastest-growing mail clients of the decade.
Commentary: All of these talks have stories that talk about what lies down the real rabbit hole of “gamification” and how things change when you try to implement something beyond badges, and points.
Running Supply Chains is Like a Massively Multiplayer Online Game
Supply chains by definition involve many different companies each with their own interests and agendas. Yet they must find ways to work together because individual company success depends on the success of the supply chain as a whole.
In this session, business agility expert Michael Hugos presents a case study from his work where he applied gaming principles to turn the operation of a 5,000 store supply chain into a massively multiplayer online game. The surprising success this achieved fueled creation of a next-generation game-based supply chain system, SCM Globe, which he will demonstrate. How it was built and how it is compatible with the workflows and tech stacks of modern day enterprises is addressed.
Developing games that can be run across organizations requires taking key game design patterns and making them work for hardware, systems and work styles that are different then what games normally target. Attendees to this session will get a good look at how one project adheres to the needs of enterprise games.
Commentary: For years I’ve had a personal interest in serious games built on top of mapping systems like Google Maps. A few things have been interesting but what Michael Hugos and his team have built and deployed in a purely browser-based AJAX format is very cool. He’s working on a new book about games and enterprises and I’m glad to see more people practicing and preaching.
Game Mods as an IT Resource for Getting Things Done
What makes modding a critical enterprise resource? The fact that it can lower costs, and get jobs done fast. This talk discusses a specific project where a modding process was used to improve the training of workers in complex fabrication service processes, and in diagnosis of operational production problems in a major U.S. semiconductor manufacturer.
Drawing on the case study specifically, this talk discusses the pros and cons of using moddable game software engines and products to achieve critical enterprise software development goals. Looking at the larger role of mods for enterprise software development we’ll also explore some similar projects focused on customer order management, and military command and control.
Audience participants will learn about case studies that demonstrate how game modding techniques and tools can be used to rapidly develop different types of game-based virtual worlds that model and simulate complex organizational processes or IT systems.
Commentary: Modding is about shortest paths to powerful solutions. We’ve covered mods before but Walt’s work includes the situational stories of working with a more specific set of IT circumstances.
Health IT! Enterprising Approaches to Combining Health and Games
At GDC 2011, Paul Tarini of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation issued a challenge to the game development community: Create games that will give players “Super Mario Health.” In other words: Help players collect real power-ups that will make them resilient to any illness or injury. Give them allies who can help in their battles against disease or depression. Send them on adventures that build up their ability to face any personal obstacle with curiosity, motivation and determination. Or just make people feel better and smile…
This session looks at three projects that are doing just that, leading the way for games to become the first-line of defense for individual and organizational health.
First up is an update on Jane McGonigal’s SuperBetter, an online game with a mobile app designed to build SuperMario Health with four kinds of resilience: physical, mental, emotional and social. In this quickfire talk, you’ll hear insights from a user-driven development process based on user-tests in both clinical and organizational settings — from Ohio State University’s hospital to Zappos Corporation.
Second up is ShapeUp, an exciting startup in the field of employee wellness that is using social networking, gaming and incentives to improve health.
Finally, GreenGoose one of the most buzzed about health startups of the year comes forward to talk about their exciting launch of a low-cost sensor-based platform for play. Learn how their platform, little wireless sensors — stickers, everywhere can make that happen. Think Farmville for your own, real backyard with hoes, rakes, and watering cans that talk to online apps adding a smile and a little humor to change our daily habits toward a healthier and happy lifestyle.
More and more healthcare is becoming a problem important to all organizations who are at the frontline of not only rising healthcare costs, but also the productivity disruptions and declines as affected by health issues. This session offers ideas and examples of games for health applications compatible with enterprise health approaches.
Commentary: Corporate wellness is a big area of activity these days. I also am by personal bias interested in games and health. But what really makes this session special is we’re talking about how do you create health game tools that integrate into people’s lives more compatibly then vast amounts of what’s been produced thus far. This session will speak to that.
And GreenGoose’s take on it all is flat out different and inspiring, in a stretch-your-imagination way. It’ll be a great way to close the day.
FINALLY…
It’s very close but we hope to have an exciting GUEST for lunch. I hope to have more to say on that in the next 24 hours before the deadline passes. If you’re a fan of people who are disrupting education across the globe – you’ll be excited if this last minute guest is able to clear their schedule.
So that’s GAME IT in an awful long post!
But wait… there’s more…
Soon Gamasutra.com will post an interview with myself, Jane, and Ian discussing not only the summit but this notion of “Game IT” and what it means versus other takes in the games/serious games/gamification/whateveryoucall it world. I am also working on a larger “whitepaper” of sorts to further explain some of these ideas in more detail.
On Tuesday there is also the Games for Change Day which includes a whole host of other great talks you can read about here:
http://schedule.gdconf.com/sessions/track/games-for-change
For me the two that I’m most interested in seeing are The Microtalks for Change what game industry legend Ian Livingstone is talking about at the end of the day.
