SERIOUS GAME MARKET

Following my prior post Fun &Serious Game Festival Bilbao , organizers today announced that AfterZoom has won the Award for the Best European Educational Serious Game. The first educational project by Abylight , AfterZoom is a "Serious Game" that teaches through entertainment. “We have added an educational component that can be gradually learnt without the need of lessons or exams ,” says company CEO Nacho García.  AfterZoom turns the Nintendo DSi/3DS camera into a virtual microscope to find microscopic, capture and take care of them, using chemical substances to keep them alive and healthy. “Players thus learn, without noticing it, that there are different organic domains they had never heard of (bacteria, archaea, etc.) and kingdoms (Animalia, Protista, Fungi, Plantae).  The video game, entirely developed and marketed by the Catalan firm, was produced with a subsidy of the Ministry of Culture, which has “contributed to significantly improve i

Via: MS Research - Two Extremes of Touch Interaction Microsoft Research Redmond researchers Hrvoje Benko and Scott Saponas have been investigating the use of touch interaction in computing devices since the mid-’00s. Now, two sharply different yet related projects demonstrate novel approaches to the world of touch and gestures (find also Serious Games Bringing Interactive Properties to Everyday Surfaces ) . OmniTouch gives users the ability to make an entire wall a touch surface, while PocketTouch enables users to interact with smartphones inside a pocket or purse, a small surface area for touch. Both projects are being unveiled at UIST 2012 , t he Association for Computing Machinery’s 24th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, being held Oct. 16-19 in Santa Barbara, Calif. OmniTouch: Wearable Multitouch Interaction Everywhere —co-authored by Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University and a former Microsoft Research intern; Be

Via: Gluciweb Time Out is a Serious Game for therapeutical education of diabetic patients, especially dedicated to young adults (find also Serious Games Improving Diabetes Self-Management Update ). The game suggests living an amazing adventure while discovering the daily life of a diabetic patient. The hero is a type 1 diabetic, holder of an insulin pump combined with continuous glucose monitoring. Augustin is a self-made renowned watchmaker but also an inveterate gambler, heading financial ruin. The storyline begins with Augustin gambling with the lease of his shop and about to lose everything. Time Out is a point and click game. The aim is to help the main character to resolve an investigation about a murder. At the same time, the player has to help the main character to manage his type 1 diabetes. Diabetes is a frequent   lifelong disease, which prognosis is closely related to the the understanding that patients have of the desease and its continuous managem

Blog Action Day 2011 on October 16 will be an opportunity to open the conversation about how food impacts all of us – individually and globally Via: Blog Action Day 2011 FOOD Blog Action Day 2011 site announced last week that since this year’s event   coincides with World Food Day, BAD's topic will be FOOD (please  find also   Serious Games Market Supports Blog Action Day 2011 FOOD   ). Whilst World Food Day     2011 theme focuses on Food Prices - From Crisis To Stability, Blog Action Day 2011 embraces a broader view. Some topics suggestions for Blog Action Day posts are: Slow Food, Fast Food: What does it actually mean ·          Malnutrition ·          Conflict over Food: Will new wars be about arable land? ·          Is your hamburger hurting the environment? It takes 24 liters of water to produce one hamburger. That means it would take over 19.9 billion liters of water to make just one hamburger for every person in Europe. ·          Trading in the

Via: Insurance & Technology - AXA Looks to Gamification, Serious Games and iPad to Excite Consumers About Life Insurance Connie O'Brien, SVP of Internet strategy and development, tells Insurance & Technology that with life insurance ownership at an all-time low, insurers must engage a new audience. New York-based life insurer AXA Equitable has never been shy about promoting the necessity of life insurance and annuities. After all, the company is famous for personifying this need as the "800-pound gorilla in the room." With a soft life insurance market, the company is redoubling its efforts to acquire new policyholders, using technology as an enticement. In September, AXA released an online game, Pass it On , which uses a "Serious Game" journey as a metaphor for the journey of life and the opportunities to purchase insurance coverage for loved ones after death. Players guide their virtual families to a better financial future by saving ga

Via: Fun & Serious Game Festival Official Website The Fun & Serious Game Festival was established in 2011 to recognize the best European video games of the year. Awards will be granted to the best productions and most brilliant careers in the video game industry, both for games developed for fun and those fulfilling cultural, educational, healthcare, or corporate purposes. The Festival Awards Gala will be held at the Campos Elíseos Theatre in Bilbao on November 8, 2011. On November 8 and 9, Serious Games professionals will get together at the 1st International Professional Conference on Serious Games , to be held in Bilbao, in the context of the Fun & Serious Game Festival . In its first edition, the event aims at consolidating the video game industry in Spain and the European continent. The conference will take place at the Euskalduna Conference Centre, next to the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum . One of the highlights of the Fun & Serious Game

Blog Action Day 2011 will be an opportunity to open the conversation about how food impacts all of us – individually and globally Via: Blog Action 2011 FOOD Serious Games Market Blog support to Blog Action Day  has now become a tradition. In 2007 on the theme of the Environment , we saw bloggers running environmental experiments, detailing innovative ideas on creating sustainable practices, and focusing their audience's attention on organizations and companies promoting green agendas. In 2008, on the theme of Poverty , the event similarly focused the blogging community's energies around discussing the wide breadth of the issue from many perspectives and identifying innovative and unexpected solutions. In 2009, on the theme of Climate Change , we focused on Climate Change Serious Games , and also on a niche topic: Climate Change & Video Games - Why Gamers Would Be Rather Good at Fighting Climate Change and Saving the World. The topic for Blog Action Day

Via: SPONGELAB BETA – New Spongelab Content Following my prior The New Spongelab Site Is A Serious Game Itself , Spongelab has been busy playing with science – its website dedicated to the global science community offers amazing new Serious Games and interactive learning tools. Biochem Gems is a deceptively simple looking puzzle game where players are tasked with assembling basic biochemical structures from their constituent pieces. Players may connect 3 identical pieces for points, but are also tasked with building a target molecule if they wish to succeed. There are 4 main stages to the game (carbohydrates, fatty acids, nucleic acids and amino acids), each containing 3 - 5 levels. After completing these levels, players are granted access to a "freeplay" mode, where they are free to work towards a leaderboard topping high score. Biochem Gems is match-3 games based on the building blocks of life (learn to assemble carbohydrates, nucleic acids, fatty acids and am