I believe it was September 2004 when I first approached the School of Mass Communication and Media Arts to seek possibility in working towards having a “Serious Games degree at the place where I work, but the amount of red tapes involved in the process is simply unbelievable, especially when it is bottoms-up. This kind of ideas typically fall into the “to-down initiative” category and unless you know the chief it is really an upstream struggle. I am sad to report that the “talk” remains talk, and I know that with every passing semester I am losing the battle to make our University the first to offer Serious Games as a degree. Well, it is opportunity lost, and life have many such mis-opportunity. The right thing to do is, to learn to cut loss (on the time wasted) and quickly move on in search of new opportunity.

We then tried to create a Collaboratory for Interactive Learning Research (CILR) as a space to do such research. We can’t use Serious Games in the name because it needed to be more inclusive, and that’s okay, too. I am glad for the Collaboratory because we are really beginning to see it work, we have some showcase products and we are beginning to get into competition and showcases, the latest I/ITSEC being a good case in point. Some 16000 participants from all over the world attended the conference, and we made good contacts.

So I am happy to report that New York’s Parsons design school will be starting a new research lab to look into serious games, as well. I am seeing an opportunity to collaborate, there. Yahoo! News report: NY School Opens Lab for Serious Games

A new research lab at the prestigious Parsons design school aims to develop video games with a conscience (called “serious games”) and study whether playing them can be a force for social good. The games, which aim to educate, appeal mostly to a niche market and are used to train public officials, students and professionals in various fields. The U.S. military, for example, trains with games that model terrorist attacks, school hostage crises and natural disasters. Other serious games teach nonviolent ways of fighting dictators and military occupiers.

Director Colleen Macklin hopes research at Parsons The New School of Design’s PETLab, launched Wednesday and made up of students and faculty, will make serious games more mainstream. “Our goal is really to create intersections between game design, social issues and learning,” she said.

PETLab, in the first such effort in the country, will create models of new types of games or interactive designs that address social issues and will do interactive research on whether playing the games helps effect positive social change. It is funded by a $450,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation as part of the foundation’s study of how digital technologies are changing the way people learn and socialize.

Lab researchers hope to create more games like the popular “Ayiti: The Cost of Life,” developed by the nonprofit Global Kids and tech company GameLab, in which players manage life for a virtual family of five in rural Haiti. The object of the game is to make spending decisions (saving money vs. throwing a party vs. buying food) that keep the family healthy.

PETLab has partnered with Games for Change, a nonprofit group that supports serious game designers and provides a forum for designers to show off their work. “We’re planting seeds for the next generation of game makers,” said Suzanne Seggerman, founder of Games for Change. “How amazing would it be to have ‘Fast Food Nation’ or ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ as a video game, where players can actually learn how to make their environment better through the game?”

So far, the lab is working with Microsoft Corp., studying whether the software maker’s Xbox game development tool could be modified to create socially conscious games. The lab also is working with the social arm of MTV’s Web site, think.MTV.com, which offers information on the environment, sexual health and immigration. And it is designing tutorials on creating games for young people.

Is PETLab the first such (serious games research) effort in the country? I don’t think so. But hey, they are the first with a $450,000 grant from MacArthur Foundation, and they are the first to claim they are first.

May be it’s time to see if we can ramp up some support for our lab, too.