GDC: Not a Banner Year for Serious Games Summit

  I've been trying to put into words the flat feeling I was left with after the Serious Games Summit.

Perhaps it's the word "summit" that generates expectations too lofty to be achieved. I had dreams of heated conversation about the challenges within and for the serious games industry. I envisioned impassioned discussions about learning design/game design mashups. I was yearning for all the new game concepts that would fuel and challenge us for another year. Such was not to be.

Rather, it was a bit stale and under-attended. Sure, a few more corporate initiatives have been funded, but not for any novel purposes. There were a couple of new tools on the market that claim to make it easier to author/script/develop learning games. But all in all, it was same old same old.

This leaves me with vague unease about where serious games are going - or, better, where the conference is going. My sense is that the company that puts on GDC keeps going to the same people to help them with their programming for serious games. This inevitably self-referential approach effectively eliminates new ideas or new entrants to the discussion.

I raise this point because I've wondered for some time whether a conference focused on the ways technologies for entertainment are used for learning and productivity should be co-located with a conference for game developers. There are great benefits, to be sure, but so many topics get left off the table. Important topics, like achieving the right balance between learning and game play; or, cross-cultural play styles and their impact on serious game design; or, whether music enhances learning equally well in story-driven games as in strategy games.

If you are a serious games professional, are your professional development needs being met? Your professional networking needs? If so, how and where? Inquiring minds want to know.

I'm serious,
Anne

Comments

[Ben Sawyer]

Hi, just stumbled across this...as I look for new ideas for sgs 2010 @ gdc and other events.

It might work better if we got some great proposals too. Some of the items people found useful were the items that I went out and recruited. We can't put stuff up that doesn't exist. In terms of finding more impassioned discussion part of the problem there is often the people offering the most passion in a "what if" speech have little to back it up because they don't have anything more to bring then theory. As the person who helps organize it I felt we had some good talks and some not great ones - that's par for the course and when we have only a single track you can't choose between something you're more interested in and we can't counter program. Mobile has a lot going on - but google Mobile +Serious Games and try to find stuff. Not much there. As for wireless access in the rooms that's not under our control.

Happy to hear more comments - but keep in mind it might have been a flat year because it's been a flat year for serious games.

The topics you bring up are interesting topics but we need them proposed to find some of them. We actually did a look at music in games for exergames at Games for Health. Also the conference has to balance learning games with other outputs and ideas.

You can reach me at bsawyer@dmill.com

[Leena Kapoor]

I am a great believer in learning through fun and games. However, I come from the field of snail games - the live games variety. I find the thought of learning design for a virtual game very interesting - so too the learning design for a real game.
I empathise with you about the commercialisation of virtual gaming. The situation is similar in real trainings. The use of indiscriminate games has made participants look more for kicks than learning. They would rather play games, rather than move on and learn to apply what they learnt - even in a simulated environment.

[Kris]

This is a very interesting, and very accurate, look at this years GDC. Not only did I find some of the SGS content flat (although there were a few notable exceptions - the presentation on Spore, the Alternate Reality Game presentations come to mind), most of the content appeared to be a rehash of last years summit. As such, I found myself wandering over to the mobile game conference where there was a lot of interesting content.

I'm not sure, however, that separating the SGS from GDC is the answer. One of the benefits of keeping the two together is that it allows developers to see what exactly is going on in the commercial game world which I see as valuable. While the some of the presentations were very good, I found it most exciting to see what the independent folks at the GDC expo were doing and trying to visualize how to incorporate some of those concepts into serious games.

I believe that there are some changes that could be made that would allow the audience to participate and make the summit more useful. My first suggestion? Here's an idea...How about wireless access within the presentation rooms? Why? Well, for starters, the following post (which references this post) has a couple of good ideas.

http://elianealhadeff.blogspot.com/2009/04/for-serious-game-like-gdc.html