The Annual ARIS Summit is an incredible time of connecting with other educators, researchers, and designers who are exploring location based games, storytelling and design.
Join us in Madison on August 16, 2016 right right before the Games+Learning+Society Conference. During the day you will see what’s been going on with ARIS this year. This is a relational day with lots of discussion around the use of mobile for storytelling, game design and field work. We look forward to seeing old friends and new.
Whether you are commissioning a game from a developer, or a developer working on a project for a client, or the market in general, this workshop provides an in-depth end-to-end look at how to build games for impact purposes. This includes health, education, behavior change, and more.
The key to the workshop is that it focuses on general approaches to designing games, but spends much more time in-detail looking at two key issues facing many impact game projects:
1. What’s are the differences when making a game for impact vs. entertainment games.
2. What are the key responsibilities and need-to-knows when game projects involve those who have not built games before? How can you optimize game development when it key members of the development and player sides of the equation are not everyday game developers or players?
Game for impact projects are different-by-design. Drawing upon over a decade of experience advising, designing, and building projects across many different platforms, purposes, and audiences workshop leader Ben Sawyer will help both developers, and commissioners of such projects reach better outcomes.
10:00 am to 5:00 pm. $160.00 for this exclusive event includes lunch: register here
The Inaugural Games + Learning + Society Early Career Workshop offers select early career scholars the opportunity for valuable career advice and critical feedback on their scholarship.
The purpose of the workshop is to nurture early career scholars in Games and Learning. We endeavor to both widen the field and deepen research in the field as a new generation of scholars embarks on their careers. The workshop will provide mentorship, build networks, and through collegial support work to advance and propel the the study of Games and Learning.
The workshops will consist of several events including panels on publishing, small group mentor time with senior scholars, professional development planning activities, and a grant writing working group. They will also have the opportunity to build new peer relationships and potential collaborations with other early career scholars who are part of the workshop.
APPLICATIONS ARE DUE ON MAY 27, 2016. Application details here.
Landscape Analysis of Second Language Learning Games
Abstract: Games have the opportunity to provide language learners rich multimodal environments that ground language learning in a situated context. There are now a wide variety of second language learning games in a number of languages for different audiences. In this paper, we examine 68 games across different platforms to evaluate their approaches to pedagogy, proficiency, assessment, skills developed, and complexity. We describe our data collection and analysis procedures and then summarize the major trends in these areas. We found that most games take a didactic pedagogical approach, are targeted toward novices, incorporate assessment systems, focus on vocabulary development, and that average internal rating did not increase with the complexity of the learning within the game. The goal of this analysis is to inform and contextualize future potential efforts in this particular domain.
New Design Principles for Mobile HistoryGreat games require a healthy ecosystem that spans not only researchers, designers and players but also universities, companies, and markets. Within this ecosystem, the health of various nodes in the network are coupled, with the strength of stakeholders in one area contingent on the success of stakeholders in others. At the state by state level, entities such as higher education programs are bound up with local game studios, with a 0.90 correlation between the two (HEVGA, 2015). Although we often cross institutional silos on the individual day-to-day level, with many of us spending half our day on campus and the other half at local studios or cooperative workspaces, it is often only rarely that we organize as groups and organizations to catalyze and improve the ecosystem overall.
In this plenary panel session, we discuss the local game ecosystem in Madison as way to highlight grassroot efforts to organize and catalyze a healthy ecosystem across business, philanthropy, university, and markets. In this session, local leaders discuss their work through the Madison Games Alliance over the last year to create a local network of game studios, independent developers, faculty, investors, and regional economic economic development agencies with the shared mission of promoting one region (here, the Madison area) as a premier site for game development and design. Local leaders discuss their goals for the local games scene, the barriers and frictions to working across silos, and their working solutions to creating a viable collaborative across nodes. Topics include strategies fro business creation and growth, attracting quality talent, and preparing students for 21st century creative tech industry.