Elyssebeth Leigh – Seven Basic Plots

Robin Petterd – Branching Games

Also check out Robin’s write-up of the event.

Serious Games Taxonomy

A Race Against Time – Future Journeys

A Race Against Time is a serious pervasive game, played on 10 May 2009 in Sydney as part of the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas. Participants needed to find secret agents and find clues to save the world.

CSI Ultimo was designed as part of the Ultimo Science Festival with the purpose to engage attendees more with the themes of the festival. Therefore CSI (Creative Science Investigation) Ultimo was played out as a hunt for scientific clues within the spaces of the Ultimo Science Festival (ABC Building, TAFE, UTS, Powerhouse Museum) which led to the final revealing of a world-changing scientific project…

Janine Cahill has been designing serious games for about 20 years and started up the Serious Games Lab in Future Journeys last year with a group of talented designers, artists, and digital media experts.

Galapagos – Marigo Raftopoulos

Marigo Raftopoulos: The concept of Galapagos as a serious game had already been in development over the last 18 months based on my doctoral research and business strategy experience. When the competition was announced, I teamed up with games designer Joe Velikovsky and a leading games development studio, RedTribe which is headed by the amazing Chris Mosely, and Marcus Gibson, a specialist sustainability consultant (and an Al Gore collaborator to boot), to prepare a submission.

A total of 53 submissions were received by ABC-Screen Australia and 5 finalists were selected to enter into the next phase of the competition – and Galapagos was one of those teams.

Self-powered gaming – Rohan Story

Rohan Story: Recently, I did a second presentation of my exercise bike generator computer game at Dorkbot (people who do interesting things with electricity).  You can see a bit of an introduction to it about half way down the page at http://dorkbotsyd.boztek.net/.

The demo consisted of hooking into to Bionx hub motor system’s power lines to measure voltage and current (thus power) going between the generator (motor) and battery.  This also involved hooking up a sensor to the steering, and writing a little Java based computer game.

The game was similar to “Snake” where you have to move around to targets.  But unlike snake, your moving speed is proportional to the amount of power currently being produced, and the direction is more finely controlled by the handlebars.

eLearning – Marguerite Grey

At Serious Games Bar Camp, Buzz Interactive Producer Marguerite Grey will be demonstrating interactive elearning programs & low cost animation. Buzz Interactive is creating an elearning program for Catholic teachers to explain how to interpret HSC Results data and a domestic violence resource.

Buzz Interactive specialises in creating educational resources for organisations, universities and filmmakers with multi-platform delivery – online, mobile or television.

What I’ve learnt about developing branching games for training – Robin Petterd

Dr Robin Petterd: Over the last 18 months I’ve been developing and working with STEM. STEM is a simple open source flash based system for developing simple branching stories and games.  Some of the projects we have used it included Responsible Service of Alcohol training,  Telephone Counselling skills for LifeLine Tasmania and a business training program for Electricians.

During the first half of the session I’ll talk about why I started to develop STEM and what I’ve learnt about developing branching stories and games. The second half is a good time to leave if you are not interesting in doing things like editing XML files!  During this stage I will give an introduction to how to currently work with STEM,  which involves editing a simple XML text file.

Understanding the Story Lines – Elyssebeth Leigh

Elyssebeth Leigh: In a book due for publication in December 2010 I explored the nature of ‘stories’ in human society. My goal was to help novice designers consider the kind of story they want to create. Depending on the learning context, I pointed out that they might need to understand the events they want to represent in any one of seven different ways.

The concept of ‘seven story lines’ was developed by Christopher Booker based on extensive research of the literature of different societies. His work provides a way of thinking about the underlying story in games and in this presentation I will introduce his work, show how it helps in the interpretation of films and familiar novels and provides useful guidelines for selecting and developing the story line for games across various disciplines and modes.

We will also have some fun playing with his seven plots to build and / or adapt concepts for games design.

Here is an ABC Radio National interview with Elyssebeth.