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Video game makers from around the world will gather
in San Francisco beginning on Monday to collaborate about the future
of play.
The 20th annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) is the largest
gathering of its kind and is dedicated to the "art, science,
and business of games," according to its organizers at CMP
Technology firm.
Among its features will be lessons in designing games for Nintendo's
popular new Wii video game console with motion-sensitive
controllers.
Casual and "serious" games summits will kick-off the week
long gathering that is expected to draw more than 12,500 people
involved in creating or publishing video games.
Casual games are based on non-violent strategy, wordplay, puzzles or
classic board games as opposed to warfare, car racing or other
action.
"The casual game market has grown to be an integral part of the
videogame industry, making gamers out of anyone with a PC (personal
computer), a mobile phone or an iPod," said conference manager
Meggan Scavio.
Serious games are those in which the main motivations are along the
lines of teaching, healing or therapy instead of purely
entertainment and profit, according to RealTime Associates president
David Warhol.
The Southern California company created a Re-Mission game that
improves the outlooks of children with cancer and gets them to
adhere to treatment programs.
Warhol will present conference goers with insights into RealTime's
new Cool School computer game designed to teach young children to
peacefully resolve conflicts ranging from bullies to classmates
cutting in lines.
US government funding for the game was inspired by the 1999
Columbine High School massacre in which two students went on a
deadly shooting rampage, according to Warhol.
Cool School lets children enter a virtual fantasy school where
erasers get into tiffs with chalkboards and balls squabble in the
playground.
"It's not so much a video game as it is an interactive
movie," Warhol told AFP. "
"Re-Mission showed that games like this work. The serious game
industry is really blossoming."
In Cool School, animated objects get into spats based on typical
clashes between children and the players get to choose how to deal
with the conflicts.
If a child opts for responses such as "bribery" or
"threatening" the scene plays out with predictably
undesirable results. If a player selects a "compromise"
option the scene has a happier ending.
"It has universal appeal because these kinds of conflicts are
universal, you can go to a rural town in China, Japan, France or
anywhere and find kids fighting over toys," said developmental
psychologist Melanie Killen, a University of Maryland professor who
spent years helping craft the games content.
"It focuses on kids in their world. Ideally, you'd love to have
teachers spend an hour a day on social skills, but pragmatically,
they have negative two minutes of time for it."
A challenge facing serious games is a lack of funding from private
publishers that routinely spurn educational or therapeutic games in
favor of violence-oriented titles such as Grand Theft Auto, Killen
said.
In the Grand Theft Auto video game, points are scored for acts such
as stealing cars or killing prostitutes and police officers.
"Serious games are wonderful, but it is an uphill battle,"
said Killen, who told of a fruitless quest to get private backing
for Cool School.
"People have got the idea that blood and gore and sexually
explicit images are what sell. I think that is a false assumption.
If given the chance, parents would buy high-quality serious games
for their children instead."
With continued backing from the US Federal Mediation and
Conciliation Service, Cool School will begin a pilot program in a
school district in the state of Illinois on Monday, Warhol said.
Cool School will need private support to build a website capable of
taking the game live online for free play by anyone, according to
Warhol.
France-based Game Connection will spend two days applying its
"matchmaking" skills to video game creators and publishers
and venture capitalists that pay to get promising titles into the
market.
Game Connection orchestrates rapid-fire meetings between the parties
in a business version of "speed dating," company spokesman
David Tractenberg told AFP.
-- AFP
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