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meaningful play 2010 travel

Session Information

TitleWhat Will Great Serious Games Look Like?
Presenter(s)Ben SawyerBen Sawyer is president of Digitalmill, Inc. a Portland, ME based consulting he helped found in 1997. Digitalmill has worked on a number of game projects and served as producer for the Virtual U project, a serious game-simulation about university management that was an Independent Games Festival finalist in 2001. Sawyer is also the author and producer of several books on games and game development and now serves as the at-large editor on game industry book titles for Paraglyph Press. In addition Sawyer's firm produces market research on the games industry for private clients and DFC Intelligence - a well known research firm focused on the games industry. Sawyer produces the Serious Games Summit held annually at the Game Developers Conference, as well as, the annual Games for Health conference.
TimeThursday, October 21, 4:30p-5:30p
LocationBallroom
FormatKeynote
DescriptionOver the past ten years I've co-designed, designed, and/or produced close to 20 serious games. Some actually even got built! A few of them, I dare say, were actually pretty good, and even effective. During that time I've seen presentations on countless others, and played more then my share of great entertainment games.

As I look back at these experiences and look forward toward the shape of technology to come I'm more and more convinced what great serious games should start to look like. In this session, I'm going to go into some depth about these ideas and explain how I'm trying to put some of them to practice. Great serious games will come in many shapes and sizes but increasingly serious games, and many entertainment games will share the same infrastructure and supporting interfaces. By understanding what these are, and understanding them in a more definitive serious games context it is my hope you will help build a new generation of more effective serious games.

For year's I've railed against a recipe for serious games. That still stands. A great serious game, like all great games, will evolve out of strong pre-production processes, great teams, and overall smart decisions and execution. However, it is also increasingly clear there are specific features, qualities, and even approaches that when leveraged against any effort, offer opportunity to improve the chances for success. This talk seeks to expose exactly those elements and not get too caught up in the specifics of what is or isn't a great gameplay experience.

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