Blog has Moved

BLOG HAS MOVED

Just a quick update to let you know this blog has now moved to my personal blog located at richardhart.wordpress.com.

First annual Serious Games Canada symposium will be held in Montreal Nov 27-28, 2007

The first annual Serious Games Canada symposium will be held in Montreal in conjunction with the Montreal International Games Summit in November, 2007. Concurrently, there will be a workshop designed to organize a national group, Serious Games Canada, for the promotion of serious game development and research in Canada. For more info visit here.

McGill University researchers create video game shown to cut cortisol

A video game designed by McGill University researchers to help train people to change their perception of social threats and boost their self-confidence has now been shown to reduce the production of the stress-related hormone cortisol. These new findings appear in the October issue of the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. For more detail click here

The team’s ongoing research led to the creation of a spin-off company called MindHabits. The company’s Trainer game recently won Telefilm Canada�s Great Canadian Video Game Competition. The distinction has earned the company $800,000 from Telefilm to be matched with private funding for a total of $1.3 million to support the commercialization of the game. The resulting product is scheduled for release this month and is available through the company�s website, www.mindhabits.com.

Busy Summer - Building Games

Sorry I haven’t written much since the summer, between teaching and working on a new brain game called Street of Dreams for Vancouver based Vivity Labs Inc. , I’ve been a busy boy. The new Flash based online brain game can be found at www.fitbrains.com. Have fun and exercise your brain!

Serious Games Workshop and Symposium in Canada coming … November 2007

There is a move afoot to hold a one day serious games workshop in November. The idea is to have a formational meeting for a Serious Games Canada group that can serve to connect researchers to developers, developers to clients, and students to jobs and graduate programs.

There will also be a symposium for general submissions held at the same time, and ask that you consider sending in a paper or talk proposal to jparker@ucalgary.ca. See also the web page at http://www.ucalgary.ca/~jparker/seriousgames/summit/.

20-30 key people would meet to form a national group, and existing research and games would be presented and discussed. This could be the startof a serious games conference in Canada, and could also result in the formation of Canadian special interest groups as well (Games for Health, Games for Environment and Sustainability).

Want to attend? Interested in helping? The event is currently in the fundraising stage at the moment, but should be more firm about arrangements in 8 weeks or so. Send mail to jparker@ucalgary.ca for expression of interest, offers of help, etc.

Serious Games Canada Workshop and Symposium - Nov 2007 Montreal

The first annual Serious Games Canada symposium will be held in Montreal in conjunction with the Montreal International Games Summit in November, 2007. Concurrently, there will be a workshop designed to organize a national group, Serious Games Canada, for the promotion of serious game development and research in Canada. For more info click here.

Fat World

There’s a new game coming out this fall called Fatworld. The new game gets players to create a world, design a character, and live out an accelerated life in that world. The player has to construct menus and recipes, decide what to eat and what to avoid, exercise or lack of it, and run a restaurant business to serve the rest of your town.

By choosing your character’s dietary and exercise habits, you can experiment with the constraints of nutrition and economics as they affect your character’s general health. Will it be wheatgrass and soy? Or fried chicken at every meal? How much can you afford to spend on food, and how does that affect your general health? For more information visit here.

HistoriCanada - Playing Games with History

Do you teach Canadian History or want to learn more about it? If so you’ll want to have a look at HistoriCanada, a new serious game based on the award-winning, best-seller Sid Meier’s Civilization III.

Gamers can play as either the English, French, Ojibwe, Huron, Mohawk, Algonquin, Montagnais, Mi’kmaq or Abenaki. The first episode focuses on the years between 1525 and 1763 and two more episodes are expected to be released in the coming months, taking players to the year 1896, through Confederation and the expansion to the West.

While players will have the option to rewrite history and take the country in a new direction, the game developers say that understanding the real history will enable players to be more successful. Historical resources including the Canadian Encyclopedia are built into the software. For more information click here.

CAVEman Unveiled

Scientists at the University of Calgary have created the world’s first complete object-oriented computer model of a human body. Unveiled today, the 4D human atlas, dubbed the CAVEman by the team who created it, allows scientists to literally get inside their experiments by translating medical and genomic data into 4D images. For more detail, click here.

Massively Multi-Player Science

 

Can a game developer be nominated for a Nobel Prize by the year 2032? Jane McGonigal thinks so. I can across a very interesting blog entry by her discussing the utilization of massively collaborative games to furthering scientific research and understanding. She discusses utilizing games embedded with real data and problems to engage the global public in hands-on, brains-on collaboration. In effect while players were involved in playing the game they would be making real contributions to solving real problems and furthering science. To read more click here