Serious Games Summit

Sessions | Speakers | Advisors

Monday & Tuesday, March 23-24, 2009
Room 3007, West Hall

The Serious Games Summit at GDC spotlights the rapidly growing serious games industry that features the use of interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors. The summit provides a forum for game developers and industry professionals to examine the future course of serious games development in areas such as education, government, health, military, science, corporate training, first responders, and social change.

Keynotes:

• Designing the First Social Reality Game to Motivate Change
  Speaker: Austin Hill (Akoha)
• Getting Serious About Alternate Reality: Designing a Different Kind of ARG
  Speaker: Frank Lantz (area/code)

Highlighted Sessions:

• Naught's Had, All's Spent: ARDEN's Failure and the Challenges of Literature Videogames
  Speaker: Elizabeth Losh (U.C. Irvine)
• SPORE's Wake: What Seriously Happened?
  Speaker: Margaret Robertson (Lookspring)
• Advancing Our Game Narratives and Technologies
  Speaker: Edmond A. Heinbockel (Visual Purple)

To view all Serious Game Summit sessions, click here.

Serious Games Summit Advisors:

Ben Sawyer
Co-Founder
Digitalmill, Inc.

Ben is the producer of Virtual U, a million dollar plus foundation funded project to build a university management simulator. Virtual U, now shipping Version 2.1, was a 2000 Independent Games Festival finalist. Ben is also the author of Serious Games: Improving Public Policy through Game-Based Learning and Simulation Whitepaper for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and was a contributor to Game Developer magazine. Ben also is the author of two books on gaming for Coriolis Group Books and is developing a book on simulations with Paraglyph Press. He has published several research reports on the games industry for DFC Intelligence.

Ian Bogost
Assistant Professor / Founding Partner
Georgia Institute of Technology / Persuasive Games LLC

Ian is a video game designer, critic, and researcher. He is assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers video games as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues.

Ian is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Video game Criticism, along with several other books and many other writings. He is currently co-authoring a book on the Atari 2600 along with a number of new video games for that platform. Ian is also completing a game about the politics of nutrition, commissioned by PBS and the iTVS, and designing editorial "newsgames" in a groundbreaking game publishing relationship with The New York Times.

Check back for session and speaker updates!

To register for the Serious Games Summit, you will need to purchase an All Access Pass or Summits and Tutorials Pass.