Games for Health 2010

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Apr 152010
 

The Games for Health conference has announced its keynotes!

Day 1: Wednesday May 26
THE MIND-BODY EXPERIENCE OF SONY MOVE: Relationships between Gaming, Play, Exercise, and More!
Dr. Richard Marks
Senior Researcher Sony US R&D group
Dr. Marks also known as the “father of the EyeToy” will discuss the relationship between gaming, play and exercise, referencing his work in the development of Sony’s new motion controller system, PlayStation Move, as well as his previous work with Sony’s EyeToy, PlayStation Eye and other interfaces.

Day 2: Thursday May 27
THE HUMAN PLAY MACHINE
Chaim Gingold
Chaim Gingold, a longtime independent game developer and original designer of Spore’s creature creator will discuss how existing game genres map onto the human brain and body and how design decisions affect who will be attracted to the game and how they will play.

You can register here; and here is the nearly full schedule.

There are a couple of events happening the day before too, a Mobile Serious Games event and a Games Accessibility Day.

Collateral damage: Apple yanks Scratch

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Apr 152010
 

MIT’s Scratch is a tool developed at the MIT Media Lab to allow young people to learn the basics of computing and programming.

That means it’s also a development environment wherein you can run interpreted code.

Which means that it can’t be on the iPad or the iPod Touch or iPhone. So Apple has yanked it from the App Store.

As the Computing Education blog points out, these restrictions are ending up by saying that you literally cannot create procedural content on these devices.

Discussion on the Scratch forums suggests that it’s because Apple wants to focus on consuming media using these devices, not producing media.  Want to be truly computing literate, where you write as well as read?  There’s no app for that.

– “Apple removes Scratch from iPad/iPhone/iTouch”

Soccer ball that is a generator

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Feb 172010
 

Brilliant, simple idea. Kick a soccer ball around, have it capture some of the energy, then give a plug so you can get the energy back out. Then give it away in Africa.

The ball uses inductive coil technology–similar to flashlights that power up when shaken. Each 15 minutes of play with the ball generates enough power to light up an LED lamp for 3 hours, so a soccer game could easily provide light for a day.

In most African countries, 95 percent of the population is living off-grid with no access to electricity. With sOccket, people in developing nations will no longer need to walk 3 hours simply to charge their cell phones. The power will—quite literally—be in their hands. The sOccket ball can be used to light an LED lamp, or charge a cellphone or battery.

Jessica Lin is a Changemaker | Changemakers.

(Via Jane McGonigal @avantgame)

A proofreading sim

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Feb 122010
 

I’d like a proofreading sim, please, that all my students could play…

— Andy Havens, in this thread on Terra Nova

Proofreading sim: slurp a text file, pop words on screen scrolling by, put randomized typos in them, require the user to buzz in when the word is spelled wrong. Sounds like a game to me! Bad spellers need not apply!

When I was a practicing journeyman letterpress printer (both my wife and I did this in college) we learned the way to proofread under those “no takeback” sorts of circumstances: read each word in isolation, one at a time, in a group, with a pause between each word, sometimes spelling out the whole word as you went.

It.

Forced.

Attention, a-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n.

On.

Each.

Word.

…which is of course a big part of the challenge of proofing text, because that’s not how we read — we read words holistically, not by piecing them together out of letters.

In any case, it would be interesting to see if making a game like this would make someone into a more accurate proofreader.

CNN on how games are healthy

 Posted by (Visited 6759 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 272009
 

Are video games good for your health? – CNN.com. It’s one of those slideshow dealies. Among the anecdotes:

  • Playing games can cure “lazy eye” better than an eye patch
  • Training with Wii Fit and Wii Sports improved balance in Parkinson’s patients

Always nice to see more of these studies…

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