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Session Information

TitleThe Play of Persuasion: Why "Serious" Isn't the Opposite of Fun
Presenter(s)Nick FortugnoNick Fortugno is a co-founder and President of Rebel Monkey, a NYC-based casual game studio. Before Rebel Monkey, Fortugno was the Director of Game Design at gameLab, where he was a designer, writer and project manager on dozens of commercial and serious games, and served as lead designer on the downloadable blockbuster Diner Dash and the award-winning serious game Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Nick teaches game design and interactive narrative design at Parsons The New School of Design, and has participated in the construction of the school's game design curiculuum. Nick is also a co-founder of the Come Out and Play street games festival hosted in New York City and Amsterdam.
TimeSaturday, October 11, 9:00a-10:00a
LocationBallroom
FormatKeynote
DescriptionThe current term for games that aim at promoting a message or educating a player are "serious" games, and there is an active debate in the persuasive game community about whether games have to be fun. But don't we want games to be fun? Why does the act of persuasion, even about a serious political or ethic topic, have to be mutual exclusive with a fun game? This talk looks at how political or educational persuasion has been used in a variety of entertainment media, and how the nature of games lends itself to a kind of emergent learning that has been used from novels to TV, where users learn without realizing it. Examples of current games in both the "serious" and not-"serious" genres show us how this hidden persuasion is at work today, and how we can more effectively harness it in the future.

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