Well it has been an interesting trip. Not only because of the conference but also all things I encountered there and my one day stay in Amsterdam. You meet a lot of interesting people when you travel alone.

Well the Apply Serious Games conference was very interesting. I did not know what to expect there since it was the first. The location was nice, the SCI building felt like a real classic English location and had a nice auditorium where all thye lectures took place. Just outside of the auditorium was the Garden Room where we could eat and talk to people on the breaks.

The lectures themselves where great. They confirmed some ideas we where already having and also let me rethink about things we took for granted. It was also refreshing to see some applications of serious games.

Some of the main themes that continued through the conference:

• Learning in Serious Games. A very interesting note on Pedagogy vs Andragogy. Something I touched earlier in this blog in my ‘getting it‘ post. Serious games is the ultimate tool of letting students explore their own learning paths instead of preformed paths. A type of learning I happened to experience for the last 4 years but which I did not connect to serious gaming yet as a big issue as I took it for granted.A main theme was that doing is the best learning. It is more expansive than easily outputting text but people will learn the most.

• Designing Serious Games. A lot of developers took us through the key issues. Many ideas that were adapted from the games world but looked at with a new perspective. It was all about the user experience and selecting stuff that enhanced the learning and eliminate the stuff which distract of the main learning goals. For example things like controlling the users headspace by selecting which actions can be controlled by the player and which are simulated and which are ignored and take care the user is not bored or overwhelmed.

• Application of learning games. We saw a lot of examples. It was notable that many were military oriented, but I think that many games are already based on combat so it is more logical and easier adapted. The other fields will follow and it was nice to see some medical, political perspective and social examples. Cisco had some nice examples of serious games that made clear by doing what was the core business of Cisco, improving productivity with networks.

• Serious games Content Management Systems. Because knowledge evolves the games themselves have to evolve. In the case studies were multiple learning CMSes which made it possible to set up scenarios by teachers for students to solve. This will prolongue the lifetime of the serious game and make it more flexible but it costs a lot more to build the flexibility. There were some nice game frameworks that made it possible to create learning games by the famous wysiwyg concept. (2 examples: Thinking Worlds & MissionMaker)

• The current state of Serious Games. It is still in the early stages of adoption. There is not yet that killer application. There was a nice lecture by prof Bob Stone on reflecting the serious games movement with the VR movement of the eighties/nineties with their Caves and VR-headsets.

• The business side of Serious Games. Topics on getting the project and dealing with the gatekeepers vs users. The gatekeepers are the people who decide and look at savings and do not always decide what is best for the users. Also some interesting notes on recycling your serious game for the more profitable commercial market.

This was the conference in a nutshell. I got a lot of insights in the market that we are now getting into with LucidMedia. Serious Games is still new but a very exiting and diverse industry. It was fun to meet new people from all kinds of disciplines looking at the same subject. I was a bit overwhelmed with how everything fitted with what we were doing and all the applied knowledge but I think I will be back next year and to also share some of my experiences and ideas.

You can discover more about a person in a half an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

Plato

(from the lecture of Paul Hollins)