Today, I am at the Games for Health day in Seattle at the Hotel Deca on 45th and Brooklyn. I have a meeting early afternoon so will have to miss part of it, but here’s my relatively raw notes from this morning, at least. I might be able to make it back later this afternoon…

Before the conference I went to Tully’s which is connected to Hotel Deca’s lobby. While there, I saw a guy I coulda sworn I met before. But I just smiled and checked email and whatnot. 😛

When registration started, I went to the registration area and got my name card and saw the same guy sitting in a chair, so I introduced myself and said he looked familiar. We couldn’t figure out where from and thought maybe we had never met. Ah well… now we’ve met. Ted Howard at XNA Game Platform Extensions/Microsoft. 🙂

While talking with him, this guy came up to me and said, “you look like someone who knows a lot about computers; you look like a tech guy,” which of course made me immediately think, ok, is it because I’m Asian or what??

Start time 9:20
Ben Sawyer gave the intro: Why Games for Health?

• Gamers rejected streaming video 10 years ago, yet the games for health and education market still produces this type of stuff.
• Four things feed into games for health: research, audience (gamers), web 2.0 (social networking stuff), and industry (trad simulations)
• Two sides of games for health: personal treatment and professional practice

Ben and some U of Central Florida folk have done a serious games (and a games for health) taxonomy. Looks nice. Will check later if there is a version on the web. My initial search turned up nothing but mentions.

Some archives of previous presentations including Ben’s brief summary (ppt)

Something Ben said was that there is no mass game audience, just a mass audience of gamers. IE, stuff like 25 million people watching the same thing doesn’t exist, but the aggregate is important. I sort of disagree in that tons of people are playing the same game, but each instance is slightly different but they have a shared experience. (instances of watcher-movie are unique, too?) I feel connected to the mass of Japanese gamers who played Dragon Quest VIII for example. I would feel connected to the mass of Final Fantasy fans if I played FFXII, etc.

Also striking is that some ephemeral web games that last a minute can sometimes get millions of players, even if it’s just for a minute. Entryway into the meme stream? Can memes be an entryway to sustainable game design projects because by establishing a meme, does that mean you’re “known?”

Bad games happen in non-game industries all the time due to fundamental design errors. We’d like to see bad games be bad not for these reasons, so we need to get an understanding of fundamental game design. In other words, get *game* designers involved with projects. Five years ago, I would’ve said you have to pair a game designer with a content developer, but I wonder if in the future they will be more and more the same person since more and more people will be gamers…

Ben also announced the winners of the 1st annual Games for Health competition and presented a big ass check to the CEO of Morphonix the winner of the prototype category with Neuromatrix.

10:00
Ellen Lapoint of HopeLab announced Ruckus Nation (which is co-sponsored by Pioneer Portfolio), a public health event/competition–present an idea for products that will motivate middle school kids to become more physically active. [maybe I should think about some sort of activity that involves Web 2.0 stuff? registration due Oct, submissions due Nov]

She then introduced Dave Warhol of Realtime Associates: Designing Games for Health

Dave showed us:

• Re-Mission-a cancer-themed shooter which has been shown to improve teen compliance with treatment–nice graphics!
• Cool School-a Flash cartoony conflict resolution game for k-2–I gotta wonder if it is effective. Kids are rewarded for correct answers, and they seem motivated to get it right…
• Ace’s Adventure-with USF hospital-preventative game about traffic safety and other modules about safety and preventable accidents and such–collect as much homework pages as possible while passing mini-games for events (like crossing the street, driveways and such)–I thought about a traffic game for driving using Mafia or GTA… kinda ironic. 🙂

Some take-aways:

• “Trojan Horse” design=create a game and embed content rather than create game around content.
• Design using metaphors since literal isn’t always optimal.
• Their design team was subject matter experts giving the info off to design team. This is how we did stuff at OMSI. Don’t need to have subject matter experts pass game mechanics specs down, but again maybe in the future that’ll happen alright. Or is it that game design experts will always trump other experts in terms of game design knowledge?
• Once in production, changes matter.
• Get an expert (5-10% of budget) to assess design work to make sure they are meeting your needs.
• Takes more than being a game developer, but the developer needs to have an interest in this space to make it worthwhile.
• If a game for health can save 5% of a billion dollar issue, it’s well worth spending $10 million on it.

11:00
PopCap Games-Greg Canessa

My question is, how does someone get a job with them? 🙂

Greg presented a lot of stats from customer surveys. Basically another data point documenting that casual games are on the rise. The idea that they compete with TV is not necessarily true since multitasking could be happening. Attention economy–how much attention counts as “devotion?”

Majority of PopCap games isn’t web games but downloadable ones. The web games advertise the downloadable ones. Mostly done with Flash. Flash executables… neat.

Literally over 1500 different builds of Bejeweled out there for all the crazy cell phones. The mobile market is like the wild, wild west. If and when the market breaks through to the cell phone space it’ll be huge; people are doing it just for the hope of the break in the future. Companies in India and elsewhere (Dublin handles PopCap’s mobile stuff) are doing ports of games. Ports run from $200k to $1 million. PC runs about $750k, Xbox about $250k. Usually opt to not port to all phones or all carriers.

They spend 6, 12, 18 months on a game’s mechanic before even dressing it up. Sometimes they ditch the game if it just doesn’t work. They have the luxury of doing this because of their position inthe market, but they stay there because the spend so much time polishing the mechanics. The content then can be layered ontop of the underlying game mechanic.

The focus on making fun games, not so much on the health benefits to their games but are open to partnerships and such.

12:00
Jerry Heneghan with Virtual Heroes

• America’s Army and other “role-playing” simulation games. Included a few first responder scenarios in AA and a kid actually save his older brother from learning what to do in AA.
• A new product called HumanSim for healthcare training and simulation is coming out soon. Case-based scenarios, real-time physiological responses, etc.
• another game on how to manage and communicate during healthcare procedures for organizations to lessen the chance of mishaps.

People I met:

• Ted Howard at XNA/Microsoft
• Claudia Linh at Starlight Starbright from LA
• John Flowers at VIP Properties (wants some engineer to help develop a game/external hardware thingie for stock options–the guy who just assumed I knew computers.)
• Elizabeth (Liz) Bacon of Devise from Portland doing a medical home game thingie to make doing regimen engaging (they do design and development consulting work)
• Janna Kimel at Intel in their Digital Health Group [thanks Liz for the correction!]
• Dessa Dal Porto with Changemakers.net–they’re hosting a $5k games-that-matter competition
• Karen Michaelson with tincan from Spokane–did anthropology and wants to talk about research on collaboration in games

So, Phil Bell, my new adviser, has weekly meetings with all his students. Wow.

Anyway, he gave me some feedback on my answer to exam question 2 (the lit review one) and suggested I read some more stuff and edit the essay a bit to reflect a more focused application of the theories I named as applied to games. I could look at this in two ways… oh damn, I have to revise or yay, someone gave me feedback and I can learn from it. 🙂 I’ll go with the latter, but can’t help but think that I wouldn’t be in this sort of position if I had access to a group project outside of classes from the get-go as it seems pretty clear that students in collaborative projects have the support needed to deepen their understanding of stuff. Or am I wrong?

I think I might have to send an email out to the Madison-MIT crazy ass network to ask if anyone wants to form a virtual reading group with me as it is pretty clear to me that I am playing (and failing) at a catch up game with people who can just talk to someone else doing games research in everyday contexts.

Anyway, also in the meeting with Phil this week, we discussed possible dissertation topics. One that I might’ve mentioned before is to look at a group of players across off-screen and on-screen contexts to see if their teamwork and general interactions and relationships are similar/different. The easier route to take, however, might be to analyze the mountain of data I collected for my WoW paper with different theoretical lenses, paying particular attention, for example, to the social dynamics and power relations at play. I could even attempt to quantify and measure certain things like level of communication events or types of utterances on different nights. Stuff to think about. Which would help the games research community more?