Games for Health, morning

August 23, 2007 markdangerchen 3 Comments

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

Life

You know what suxorz?

August 22, 2007 markdangerchen Leave a comment

UW has this policy for graduate students who hold a position during the school year and opt into the health insurance and other benefits to also cover the student during the summer after the school year. That sounds great.

But there’s a catch.

Dependents are also covered provided you pay a premium every month that is automatically deducted from your paycheck. This premium extends into the summer which is new to me, though when I look at the available material online it is relatively clear, if buried… We assumed that Robin would be covered during the summer just like me without doing anything. But now that I think about it, it makes sense that we’d have to pay for her coverage.

But for some reason dependents are dropped during the summer unless you pay the premium for the whole summer at the beginning of the summer. This is true even if you also hold a summer position and get a regular bi-weekly paycheck like the rest of the school year. Why they can’t auto deduct from your paycheck, I have no idea.

So, anyway, we did not know this though the GAIP benefits people claim they mailed a letter to us explaining these things back on July 6th. Furthermore, an email was sent to all grad students with appointments on May 18, but I can neither confirm nor deny that since it isn’t in my inbox, trash, or archives. The email (which I was told is also archived online) says something like:

1. You will continue to receive benefits over the summer since you got them during the school year.

2. Dependents are automatically covered also.

3. Oh, btw, you have to pay a premium for your dependents differently than the rest of the school year.

4. If you don’t then actually they aren’t automatically covered…

This basically translates to “dependents are automatically dropped unless you do something even though we start the letter off saying you needn’t do anything to continue to receive benefits.”

What’s most vexing about this is that Robin had a doctor’s appointment for July 5 (which I think she scheduled in June when she was covered, natch). Why would we deliberately opt out of coverage for her when she had a freakin appointment during the summer? The letter was supposedly sent after she had her appointment, too, so we wouldn’t have known at the time that we would have to pay the premium soon for her to be covered.

Of course, the deadline to pay the premium (July 31, afaik) was about two weeks before we received notice from the benefits folks that she was not covered for the appointments she had had. And, of course, she’s had follow-up appointments in the interim which we’ll receive the Explanation of Benefits for probably next month.

How is this acceptable??

So, today I get to craft an appeal letter. Do you think they’ll understand common sense when I tell them that it is obvious we had no idea we had to pay a premium at the beginning of the summer, as evidenced by the fact that we’re having doctor’s appointments and lab work done during the summer? My pessimistic side makes me think they’ll be bureaucratic and we’ll have to appeal the appeal.

Games Research

Ian Bogost on The Colbert Report!

August 11, 2007 markdangerchen Leave a comment

(via The Ludologist)

Life

3Dworld

August 11, 2007 markdangerchen Leave a comment

3Dworld

(via Drawn!)

Life

August 10, 2007 markdangerchen Leave a comment

From a conversation with Isaac 3rd week in July

are we blinded by our proximity to digital culture? this whole participation thing… are we just seeing a small pocket of resistance and social mobility of a larger society?
Isaac mentioned that a Marxist take would be that the larger social structure is a certain way and there’ve always been sites of democratic mini-systems but the overall structure is the same. Neo-liberal capitalist society is like that; it’s a contradiction. In order to have structure it has to allow a certain degree of freedom.
progressive education needs to include both process and content; it can’t treat them as divorced from each other. In terms of new literacy, people not only need to read and write new texts but they have to understand the texts and the political ideologies at work.

From a conversation with Dennis

difference between empathy and sympathy… on a scale with apathy and antipathy?
do these match up with Nel Noddings’ ethics of care as opposed to rational individually based motivations?
people are motivated either out of fear or love… same thing?
religious identities or any identities are assumed and latched onto by certain people who do not question their beliefs
America should be more like The Simpsons in terms of forgiveness rather than persecution of those at fault
“The first step is admitting we have a problem.” – Dennis