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Fun and Serious Games

www.cartoonstock.com

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Raph Koster

http://www.raphkoster.com/

Raphael "Raph" Koster author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design is widely recognized for his work as the lead designer of Ultima Online and the creative director behind Star Wars Galaxies.

3http://www.theoryoffun.com

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What Games Are

• Games are puzzles to solve.

• We learn the underlying patterns, grok them fully,

and file them away to re-run as needed.

• Difference between games and reality is that the

stakes are lower with games.

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What Games Are

• Games serve as very fundamental and powerful learning tools.

• “Play” and “Games” both belong in the same category of “iconified representations of human experience that we can practice with and learn patterns from.

• Books vs Games. (According to Koster) Games can accelerate the grokking process ... where you can practice a pattern and run permutations.

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• Fun is all about our brains feeling good -- the release of endorphins into our system.

• One of the subtlest releases of endorphins is at the moment of triumph when we learn something or master a task.

• Our bodies reward us with pleasure.• In other words, fun is the act of mastering a problem

mentally.

What is Fun?

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Boredom is the opposite

When you feel a game/book/class/parental meal experience is repetitive or derivative, it grows boring because it presents no cognitive challenge.

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Ian Bogost “Playing video games is a kind of

literacy. Not the literacy that helps us read books or write term papers, but the kind of literacy that helps us make or critique the systems we live in . . . . When we learn to play games with an eye toward uncovering their procedural rhetorics, we learn to ask questions about the models such games present” (Bogost).

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James Gee Multimodal Principle.

“Meanings and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, words, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.)”

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Lori Shyba Social issue games, like other

activist art, can tune us in to the world around us. Games can help define the things we believe in and can amplify our ethical consciousness by provoking us to take action.

Serious Games Canada/Jeux Serieux Canada

Serious Games Canada Symposium, Games for Training

Distil Interactive – Ottawa, Ontario

Response Ready is a virtual training solution based on the Canadian Standards Association's (CSA) Z731-03 standard. It tests and develops users' ability to identify hazards and assess risk.

http://www.distilinteractive.com/

Serious Games Canada Symposium, Games for Training

Coole Immersive -- Edmonton, Alberta

Focusing on front line work roles for the service rig sector of the oil & gas industry, SimuLynx Rig Skills uses a first person perspective 3D environment to give the user an immersive "hands-on, off-site" learning experience.

http://www.cooleimmersive.com

Serious Games Canada Symposium, Games for Education

Knight Elimar’s Last JoustRichard Levy, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary

A virtual environment game for promoting literacy across the curriculum.

http://www.ucalgary.ca/evds/levy

Serious Games Canada Symposium, Social Issue Games

ContagionYork University and Simon Fraser University

"Contagion” is a web-based educational game in which players can learn self-care practices and play through ethical considerations in a virtual world on the brink of pandemic.

http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/

Serious Games Canada Symposium, Social Issue Games

Terry Lavendar — Homeless, It’s No GameSimon Fraser University

“Welcome to Life on the Street. Can you survive for 24 hours with your esteem and your person intact?” Selected for the game showcase at the annual Games for Change conference in New York City. It's one of only 17 games to be featured.http://www.homelessgame.net/

Serious Games Canada Symposium, Social Issue Games

Tibet and OceanquestDigital Media Lab, University of Calgary

Tibet – Status of Tibet as occupied territory

Oceanquest – Ocean Floor Ecology

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~parker/new/Tibet/tibethome.html

Blame CanadaLori Editorializes

Blame Canada for our tenacity of being “rooted in reality.” Blame the NFB and the CBC for leading the world in documentary media and critical engagement with questions about fact, truth, point of view, and bias. Following this, Serious Games Canada is poised to contribute to this legacy by advocating new ways of simulating reality. Whether they be games for training, or for education, or for activism, our common theme is to bring us closer to conditions of “safety.” Blame us if we can make it happen.