Information Trails

What? This is unbelievable. How many conferences are out there are showcasing Serious Games research and application?

1st IEEE International Conference in Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications 2009 (VS-GAMES’09)

March 23 - 24, Coventry, UK

Official Site: http://www.vs-games.org.uk/

Context

The emergence of serious or non-leisure uses of games technologies and virtual world applications has been swift and dramatic over the last five years. As a result, there has been little time to develop the theoretical and academic rigour in the emerging field. This problem has been exacerbated by the largely technological drive of the technologies, with often little time to consider more user-centred approaches to design and use of serious applications of games and virtual world technologies. Another factor affecting the field has been the general aspects of convergence between new technologies, for example AI applications, augmented reality, mobile technologies, GPS technologies, sensor technologies and social software.

Together this has presented potential for developing new technologies based upon immersive and interactive interfaces and has in parallel produced many unanswered questions in terms of the usage of the formats. As a result there is a clear need to consider new frameworks, theories, methods and design
strategies for making serious applications of games and virtual world technologies more effective and useful as part of education, health and training.

Scope

The first IEEE International Conference in Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications 2009 aims to meet the significant challenges of the cross-disciplinary community that work around these serious application areas by bringing the community together to share case studies of practice, to present new frameworks, methodologies and theories and to begin the process of developing shared cross-disciplinary outputs. In order to achieve this main aim the conference will pioneer new methods for bringing together
and supporting communities of practice emerging in themed areas beyond the duration of the conference. Using the conference as an ignition to support a wider aspiration to form and sustain a community of practice around the field. To achieve this, the team at the SGI will use innovative software called Intronetworks, which allows conference participants to create their own profile allowing them to identify like-minded and complementary skilled colleagues.

The term ‘Serious Games‘ covers a broad range of applications from flash-based animations to totally immersive and code driven 3D environments where users interface with large volumes of data through sophisticated and interactive digital interfaces. This shift towards immersive world applications being used to support education, health and training activities marks the beginning of new challenges that offer real scope for collaborative and multi-disciplinary research solutions, and real opportunities for innovative development. We invite researchers, developers, practitioners and decision-makers working with or applying serious games in their communities to present papers in the following two main streams of the conference: games and virtual world applications for serious applications.

• Applications (e.g. case studies, exemplars, practice examples)
• Methodologies, theories and frameworks (e.g. participatory design methods, mixed methodologies for data collection and analysis, cross-disciplinary methods)
• Evaluation approaches and studies

Oh, and how everyone is talking about evaluation approaches… interesting.