Researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA worked together to create an online gaming system that uses players to help diagnose malaria. In the game, players distinguish malaria-infected red blood cells from healthy red blood cells by viewing digital images obtained from microscopes.

University of Tennessee graduate student Charles Chin has won the Vol Court spring business pitch competition and is on track to develop and release a video game similar to SimCity that highlights the importance of energy production and consumption in the real world.

Epic Games has inked a long-term deal with Virtual Heroes, a division of Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ARA). The Virtual Heroes Division of Applied Research Associates creates collaborative interactive learning solutions for healthcare, federal systems, and corporate training markets. Virtual Heroes will use Unreal Engine technology to create interactive educational and training software to be used by various U.S. government departments and agencies.

A new association has formed to help promote the serious gaming industry, aptly called The Serious Games Association. The mission statement of the group is to create an atmosphere where publishers, developers, technology providers, and those involved in the serious games sector can come together to advance their cause of using game technology to promote real world change or awareness on serious issues.

The First Person Cultural Trainer (FPCT) has been awarded the Best Game award in the Government Category of the 2011 Serious Games Showcase and Challenge. FPCT is sponsored by U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command G-2 Intelligence Support (TRADOC). The Serious Games Showcase was part of the Interservice/Interindustry Training and Simulation Education Conference (I/ITSEC), and was held in Orlando, Fla., from November 28 through December 1.

The 2011 International Serious Play Awards, which honors "outstanding corporate, military, healthcare and learning" software titles, announced that it has recognized 20 serious games. The medal winners were revealed at the Serious Play Conference, held August 23-25 at Redmond, WA's DigiPen Institute of Technology, as attended by Gamasutra. Air Medic Sky One from University Medical Center Utrecht won Best of Show.

Researcher Anita Lynn Furtner says that the best way to train for a crisis is to use films and video games. She said crisis management training needs a change and that it is time to do away with lectures and boring PowerPoint presentations and consider films and video games.

"You have a lecture, you have a PowerPoint and a knowledge check and, there, you are considered trained and certified. And, most likely, you only do this once a year," said Furtner. She wrote her dissertation at the University of Arizona about the potential use of films and video games for crisis management training. She earned her doctoral degree in rhetoric, composition and the teaching of English in May

"That's not what I call motivating or engaging, and it doesn't lead to any long-term recall," added Furtner.

Algoma Games for Health, a development team at Algoma University that specializes in developing serious games for educational and rehabilitation purposes, has received a cash injection from Ontario's provincial funding. The team will use the $713,200 to develop a game that will help stroke victims at the Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre. The news was announced by MPP David Orazietti. The program will combine video conferencing, voice recognition and therapeutic video games to provide an online platform to help improve speech therapy.

"We are continuing to build on the progress we have made improving health care infrastructure and front-line services in Sault Ste. Marie by making investments that are delivering measurable results, including this initiative that will provide stoke victims with interactive rehabilitation therapy to help improve their quality of life," said Orazietti.

Grants are now available from the National Endowment for the Arts grants for a variety of video game related projects. This is due in part to an expansion of the agency's Arts on Radio and Television category, which has been renamed "Arts in Media." The change expands the category to include mobile technology, digital games and a variety of gaming platforms.

NEA grants are available to help with various costs such as development, production and distribution and range from $10,000 to $200,000, based on the complexity of the project submission.

September 1 is the deadline for submissions, which can be made via the NEA site.

Source: Serious Games Source

Insurance company Aetna is banking on a new partnership with social game developer Mindbloom Partners that it hopes will motivate its customers to live healthier lifestyles. Mindbloom will deliver its game Life Game to Aetna customers. The game, which launched last July, encourages players to live healthier, more balanced lives by providing a variety of challenges related to health, spirituality, relationships, leisure, lifestyle, finances, creativity, and career.

Players grow and maintain a "Life Tree" that represents the life players want to have. As the player progresses, branches and leaves representing specific goals grow and they are rewarded with virtual currency to unlock new features and content.

DigiPen Institute of Technology announced that the first ever Serious Play Conference is seeking speakers to talk about creating serious games that help various industries and educational needs. The conference will be held Tuesday – Thursday, Aug. 23 – 25, 2011 at the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington.

DigiPen says that its Serious Play conference aims to push serious game development to a higher competency – building games that deliver predictable results." They also promise that heads of corporate, military, health care programs, senior educators, top simulation and education developers, strategic hardware and software vendors and industry leaders will be in attendance.

The Department of Defense have developed a new simulation technology to help the Navy track enemy submarines and they are testing it by rolling it into a commercial computer game. The Defense Advanced Research Project Arm's Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) software simulates tracking the evasive maneuvers used by submarines. The agency says that the software will soon be rolled into the ACTUV program's computers.

But the real kicker is who will get to test this new technique: simulation game players. DARPA has integrated it into the Dangerous Waters computer game by Sonalysts Combat Simulations and has made the ACTUV Tactics Simulator available online as a free download as well.

The organizers of the Games For Change festival have issued a call for speakers, demos and award nominees for its 8th annual event. Game For Change takes place in New York City June 20 - 22. Those interested in submitting ideas should visit the event's official site.

A minimum of five in-development games that adhere to the organization’s goal of supporting "serious games" will be shown off during the event this year. These games will be shown off to designers and potential funders for feedback and possible opportunities. Games that are already completed can be submitted for the annual Games for Change Awards. Award categories including Direct Impact, Learning & Education, Transmedia and the Knight News Game Award.

Speakers are also welcomed to pitch topics such as promoting real-world action, games that aid underserved communities, games and education, games as art, and more.

The sixth annual Games for Health Conference will run May 25-27 in Boston at the Hyatt Harborside Hotel.

Backed by the Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the conference “focuses on supporting ideas that may lead to breakthroughs in the future of health and health care.”

Dr. Richard Marks, a Sony Computer Entertainment Senior Researcher, will kick off the conference with a keynote examining the “Mind-Body Experience of Sony Move” and the relationships between gaming, play and exercise.  All told, over 100 sessions will be served up, including “What Kids Get Out of Video Games: The Presence of Games in Healthy Child Development” with Dr. Cheryl Olsen and “Exploring the Concept of Healthy Videogaming & Gamers” with Games for Health Founder, Ben Sawyer.

Our man Dan Rosenthal is at the Game Developers Conference and filed this report from a lecture he attended last night:

The Serious Games Summit at GDC closed out its first day with a sobering presentation from Allan McCullough and Parry Aftab entitled "Violence Prevention -- Playing A Video Game Can Make A Difference." Sponsored by the Child Safety Research and Innovation Center, the session explained that while games often get criticized as being too violent, the games industry can actually work to lessen the real-world effects of violence and abuse against children through serious games.

The Homeland Guantanamos website offers an embedded Flash game designed to highlight the plight of immigrant detainees in U.S. custody.

Users will take on the role of a journalist posing undercover as an Immigrant Detention Center Guard in order to solve the death of 52-year old Guinea immigrant Boubacar Bah. A friendly detainee inside will aid the investigation as you tour the facility in search of clues.

The game is based on true events—Bah was a real detainee at the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey (which the game models the detainee center after) and died in custody on May 30, 2007.

A video report from the New York Times on Bah’s death claims that following a fall, believed to have taken place in a bathroom, he was found unconscious. Bah later briefly regained consciousness and was taken to a medical center, where he became agitated. He was shackled and put in solitary confinement, where he again became unresponsive. 15 hours after his fall, Bah was rushed into emergency brain surgery. His family was not notified until five days after the fall. Bah was in a coma for four months before eventually dying.

The website estimates that 300,000 legal and illegal immigrants are currently in custody in the U.S. and that 87 immigrants have died in custody since 2003.

The game was developed by Free Range Studios for the human rights organization Breakthrough.

The New York Times video was just one-part of a series of reports on in-custody deaths of immigrants in the U.S.


Via ArtThreat.net

A new browser-based game attempts to teach students the ins and outs of debt management.

Debt Ski, launched in conjunction by mtvU and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, was developed by Persuasive Games. The title has players guide a jet-ski riding swine—Piggy Banks—through a series of obstacles while charging them with managing Piggy’s savings and keeping him out of debt.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation President and CEO Dave Walker explained to BusinessWorld the impetus for designing the educational games:

Young people, who are arguably the most important audience to reach these days when it comes to inspiring social change, are hard to reach through traditional media.

Last December GamePolitics reported on Pamoja Mtaani, a PC game developed through a partnership with Warner Bros. Interactive, North Carolina-based Virtual Heroes (creators of America's Army) and The Partnership For an HIV-free Generation.

The game's title translates to "Together in the Hood," and Pamoja Mtaani aims to help players learn skills to negotiate difficult issues such as crime and HIV in some of East Africa's most impoverished areas.

GP reader Wai Yen Tang dropped us a line to say that a video report on the game and how it is being used is now available on YouTube.

Texting while driving is increasingly understood to be a very dangerous activity.

Now, an online game published by the New York Times shows just how much a driver's reaction time is impacted by texting. Try the game here.

Via: OhMyGov!

It doesn't get much better than this.

The Illinois Soybean Association will unveil a game exhibit featuring Abe Lincoln and, of course, the soybean at its Farm Progress Show in Decatur next month.

The game, Think'n with Lincoln, celebrates the 200th birthday of the 16th president. Here a description from the press release:

One of the chief draws in the Farm Progress Show exhibit is the new "Think'n with Lincoln" game, a customized video game experience designed to entice visitors to answer trivia questions. Although soybean information is emphasized, Abraham Lincoln trivia is also included to tie in with the 200th birthday celebration and other Lincoln materials within the exhibit.

Positioned in one corner of the main tent, "Think'n with Lincoln" will be projected on a large, flat-panel television screen and is designed to allow up to three players to compete at a time. Each trivia question will appear on the screen with multiple-choice and true-false answers as "Abraham Lincoln" instructs participants, moderates the game and hands out prizes. Randy Duncan, an accomplished Abraham Lincoln impersonator, will act as game host and will encourage visitors to see the exhibits on display and play the game.

Can't make it to the farm show? Fear not. When the event is over, the game will remain available online.

It's a sad day when one of the web's most intelligent game-oriented sites rides off into the sunset.

And so it is with Water Cooler Games, operated since 2003 by Georgia Tech prof Ian Bogost and researcher Gonzalo Frasca. Both academics are also accomplished designers of provocative, issue-oriented games.

We note the following in the site's RSS feed this morning:

Water Cooler Games is now closed. Thanks for reading all these years. The site has been archived in full (with comments)... For my take on "videogames with an agenda," you might want to read Persuasive Games. I am now blogging at Bogost.com...

—Ian Bogost, August 2009

Because the issue-oriented focus of Water Cooler Games often intersected with that of GamePolitics, WCG was frequently cited here on GP. We will miss it, but it's good to know that it will live on in an archived version.

UPDATE: Ian Bogost has posted a lengthy commentary on the WCG closure:

From my perspective, the Water Cooler Games project was very much a success. The fact that so many venues now exist for discussing of what we coyly called "videogames with an agenda" speaks at least in part to the influence we exerted.

More so, the site had been immensely useful in helping me conduct research. My 2007 book Persuasive Games drew many examples from titles we covered on Water Cooler Games... 

 

Closing WCG opens up new opportunities for my writing, on this site and elsewhere... The truth is that I've said most of what I want to say about [political games, advertising and games, and other topics covered on WCG]...

GP: We wish Ian continued success and the best of luck going forward...

GameCulture reports on Card Checked, a Flash game created by Libertarian Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Relief.

When we last saw Norquist on the pages of GamePolitics he was speaking out in opposition to video game legislation in Utah. This time around, his game - set in a tattoo parlor - is meant to rally opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. GameCulture explains:

Card Check [is a] a majority sign-up policy that makes it easier for unions to get employer recognition. If at least 50% of employees sign a card authorizing representation, secret ballots can be bypassed. ATR says that "in the game, the player is a tattoo artist who faces several attempts by union organizers to get you to sign the card, including visiting you at home, vandalizing your car, threatening your cat, and even offering you marijuana."

As it turns out, labor leader Eddie Vale of the AFL-CIO took offense not only to the game's portrayal of union organizers as thugs, but to its game play as well:

As anyone who actually grew up playing Atari or Nintendo will know, calling this a video game is as accurate as their lies about the Employee Free Choice Act...

Norquist minion Brian Johnson wasted no time in firing back at Vale:

I'm not sure that a 1930s throwback like the AFL-CIO should be giving advice about what's cool. We're not sure what video games have been cranked out this year by the international brotherhood of video game programmers, but we'd be happy to stack our game up to any union-made product any day.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a $100,000 grant to a Norfolk University history professor to develop a video game which tells the tale of the Underground Railroad.

Prof. Cassandra Newby-Alexander said that the history of the Underground Railroad, a network which helped slaves escape from the South in pre-Civil War days, is not well understood:

The underground Railroad was a much more complex issue than it's been made out. When you push a person to a point where they have nothing to lose, that's when you create a formidable enemy. Ultimately, human beings are going to be free.

When you ask people to describe the Underground Railroad, they think of Harriet Tubman on foot, with a gun. Most slaves didn't escape that way. I don't want to dumb-down the game.

Newby-Alexander is working with a local playwright to create a script for the game, which is expected for PC in 2011.

Via: Kotaku

Yesterday in the Big Apple, socially-aware teens held the first-ever NYC Youth Media & Technology Festival. The event spotlighted the work of teenagers who create video games and other digital media projects in order to advance social causes.

Organizers expected about 100 attendees for the Festival. The gathering was intended to produce a citywide dialogue about the role of new media and technology in teens' lives and how it can be utilized to promotes issues kids care about.

A group of young designers affiliated with the New York Public Library were scheduled to showcase their designs and conceptualizations for serious video games about subjects like celebrity drug use, media consolidation and genocide.

Meanwhile, teens from the Global Kids Virtual Video Project premiered an animated short film about child sex trafficking in the United States.  Members of MOUSE discussed their efforts to advance technology in New York City public schools by developing open source labs, advocating for the One Laptop Per Child campaign and other efforts.

The invitation-only event was held at the Parsons The New School for Design.

-Doug Buffone, Entertainment Consumers Association intern

The 5th annual Games For Health Conference formally kicks off tomorrow in Boston.

The conference, which runs through Friday, will feature a "Games Accessibility Day" today, devoted to examing way to make games playable by those with physical and cognitive disabilities.

The main conference agenda which begins on Thursday will feature more than 40 sessions:

Topics include exergaming, physical therapy, disease management, health behavior change, bio-feedback, epidemiology, training, cognitive exercise, nutrition and health education.

Somewhat lost in the pre-E3 buzz is the 6th Annual Games For Change Festival, currently underway in New York City.

The show has a terrific lineup of speakers, including Ian Bogost, Henry Jenkins, Clive Thompson, Lucy Bradshaw, N'Gai Croal, and James Paul Gee.

For updated G4C Festival news, check out the official Games For Change Twitter feed.

The Korean government will invest 80 billion won (US$63.52 million) to support the country's growing serious games business, reports Korea IT Times.

If successful, Korea will expand its serious games market by a factor of six by 2012. Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Yu In-chon commented:

The functional game market is at an early stage, but the market is an emerging blue ocean. The government is going to give support to prompt private investment in that field.

Mervyn Levin of the U.K.'s Serious Games Institute reports on a 2008 visit to Seoul where he observed some of the Korean serious game projects in development:

An interesting Korean Serious Games project was presented by T3 Entertainment on anti-bullying, a subject of obvious relevance to the UK. The title was "Online 'Star Stone' Development for Improvement of Personal Relations".

South Korean University research was also presented demonstrating evidence of the relationship between on-line games and the development of leadership skills in the workplace...

Via: gamesindustry.biz

With all of the hype about Swine Flu lately, Ian Bogost points out that his Persuasive Games studio partnered with Traffic Games of Scotland a few months back to create Killer Flu.

The game, built at the request of the UK Clinical Virology Network, teaches players lessons about how seasonal and pandemic influenza spread:

While our game focuses on an avian flu pandemic, the same principles apply to the present situation. The players of the game will find it more difficult than they suspect to create the pandemic the news would have us believe is imminent...

Via: Gamasutra

British political figure Lord Puttnam wants people to know about global warming, and he wants video games to help teach them.

As reported by Edge Online, Puttnam, who is also a film producer, issued a press release promoting the nexus of games and climate change education:

Serious games based upon real-life geography should be vital tools in our fight against climate change. Educating people about the impact of prolonged changes to our climate in an accessible way is the best catalyst for action I know.‭

Lord Puttnam previously chaired‭ ‬the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Draft Climate Change Bill and is the founding Chair‭ ‬of the National Endowment for Science,‭ ‬Technology and the Arts.

He also delivered the closing keynote at last September's Handheld Learning 2008 conference in London.

As we saw in 2008 with Breakthrough's immigration rights-themed I.C.E.D!, non-profits are increasingly turning to game tech to reach a wider - and younger - audience.

Along that line Ars Technica reports that Games for Change has released a toolkit designed to help non-profits tap learn how to tap into issue-oriented games of their own.

The Games for Change Toolkit is primarily a Flash-based presentation containing video, reference material, and links to demonstration games that cover various aspects of game design, from the initial concept to production and distribution. While an actual [software development kit] may not be involved, the toolkit introduces nonprofit organizations to both the broad potential and finer details of bringing an issue-conscious game into reality...

The Toolkit covers seven primary topics and introduces each with a video snippet of their relative presenter's speech: Urge, Concept, Design, Production, Distribution, Evaluation, and Case Study...