Serious Game Design
On Monday 30 September, we organised a lunchtime lecture on Serious Games. Thomas de Groot of T-Xchange was the speaker. T-Xchange is a company that originated from cooperation between Thales and the University of Twente. The lecture took place in the Zilverling's Smart XP lab and was well attended.
Thomas de Groot gave a brief introduction of what exactly Serious Games are. There are basically three forms. Games for creating awareness, games to train in specific knowledge and co-creation games. The latter form is very interesting because new things are designed within the game. We were also told how games are designed and tested. Thomas showed some more nice examples of games. Like the game Go4it, in which soldiers can be trained to see opportunities, strengths and weaknesses of themselves. Another example was the Mayor's Game in which civil servants learn to make decisions in crisis situations. This involves dilemmas where there are no right or wrong answers.
It was a successful activity with a tasty lunch. At the end, interesting questions from the audience were asked as a wrap-up.
Description
Serious Game Design: abstraction abstraction, abstraction.
Nearly everyone has already heard about 'serious gaming', but what is this serious gaming actually?
Don't worry if you are not sure about the answer, as there are many different aspects to this concept that make it quite complicated!
Serious gaming is of course a software designed to entertain the user, but at the same time a central goal is to function also as a learning tool in many different aspects of life. Serious gaming is also a mean to economic innovation, as it was used by T-Xchange to simulate the possible future of the Airport of Twente, where all the stakeholders had to play a role game based on what their own preferences where, but also relating them to the other players.
During this talk Thomas de Groot will give a short introduction about T-Xchange and their games. The main topic of the talk will be about the serious game design process.
Mainly about the process of creating a game model based on real-world information. He will use a couple of projects as an example.
Lunch will be included!
Speaker(s)
Thomas de Groot is a Serious Game Designer at T-Xchange and Game Researcher at the University of Twente
Location
Zilverling, SmartXP room
Organiser
Informatica
KIVI Students Twente
Name and contact details for information
Elfride Dijkstra