Future Play

Ben Sawyer kicked off FuturePlay 2008 with his keynote about the serious games space and he asked the question "Are we learning yet?"My impressions from his talk are that content and context are king, you can't teach oceanography with an FPS, and you can't use the America's Army model for every problem. (I am VASTLY oversimplifying the message here...) His talk was great, so I hope you enjoy it.Ben's talk.

John Hopson is a pretty cool guy. He has a PhD in experimental psychology, whcih in my books already makes him cool. Then it turns out, his PhD work was done in a lab where they study animal cognition. OK, that is even cooler, as well, the cool kids take animal cognition. Then we got to talking and realized we had read each others' stuff. I know that has nothing to do with game design, but it is, to me, an indication of the serendipitous connections you can make at FuturePlay.Anyway most of you will know John from his work on a little text called "Behavioral Game Design" which applies the psychological literature to game design. See I knew I liked this guy...John gave a keynote at FuturePlay 2007 which I recorded with my little iRiver (this year I will use a Zoom H2 which is MUCH better). So some of the audio is a bit shall we say messy. You will also notice someone (who I will not name...) picking up my recorder and looking at it and you will hear me say "That's my recorder" when she asks what she i

Yeah I know, I said that I had interviewed her a few posts back, well, here is the interview. This is a really cool project and I really hope there are some people out there that will share their game stories with Diane.Music by Battery Life and Jet Pin Army.Listen and Enjoy

During the conference I recorded a couple of interviews, so besides the keynotes I got to hang out with some cool people and talk games. One of those cool people was (well is, I am sure he is still cool...) Eitan Glinert. Eitan and others have been working on a game that is equally playable for sighted and visually impaired people. Having low vision myself, this game is pretty interesting to me. The game is called Audiodyssey, it is available now as a free download, check it out.He is also getting going on a startup in May called Fire Hose VIdeo Games, so if you need a job in May or so, perhaps you should contact Eitan....Music in this episode is from Uncle Seth, (whose bass player I hung out with at the Toronto Podcast Meetup on Thursday, November 15) and The Mark Harold Band.Listen Now.

I did not get a chance to go to Mia's talk yesterday, as I was off to the Toronto Podcast Meetup (which was cool BTW, thanks to Scarborough Dude, John Meadows, Mark Blevis et al). However, I interviewed Mia on T6, episode 52, so I thought I would post that.Enjoy.