2008 Game Symposium Topics & Biographies

SPEAKER: Paolo Pedercini,  "From Emergency to Emergence: Making Games in a Screwed Up World"  

Paolo Pedercini was born in 1981 somewhere in northern Italy. He studied electronics and took a BA degree in visual design and multimedia. He has been teaching "multimedia design" at NABA - new academy of fine arts in Milan for two years. He worked as creative director and web developer for the first Italian alternative marketing agency.

He's currently pursuing his MFA degree in Electronic Arts at the Rensselaer. In his spare time he designs alternative video games and researches social software and virtual worlds.   He is a co-founder of Molleindustria (soft-industry) a group that aims to re-appropriate video games as a popular form of mass communication. Our objective is to investigate the persuasive potentials of the medium by subverting mainstream video gaming cliché.The Italian version of www.molleindustria.org has been online since December 2003, the "international" one since April 2004. So far we have published nine games (some of them are available only in Italian) dealing with various social issues ranging from the deterioration of labor condition to the critique of the fast food industry. Thanks to the viral diffusion on the net, the games have been played by millions people and the project obtained extensive media coverage from the national and international press

Simulation games can be useful tools to investigate, criticize and prefigure complex systems as the ecological, the economical or the social ones. They encourage the player to a holistic approach to problem solving, an approach that, according to the ecologists, is necessary to face the challenges of this new century.  But we have to acknowledge the inevitable limits and ideological components that reside in every simulation game. The social reading of interactive text is still an uncommon practice but it can be stimulated by alternative game design strategies.

PANEL: "Games for Health: A Foundation Takes the Lead in Applying Serious Games"

Paul Tarini

Paul Tarini, M.A., a senior program officer with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is the team leader for the Foundation's Pioneer Portfolio, which actively seeks innovative projects that can lead to fundamental breakthroughs in health and health care. Tarini believes that Pioneer has "both an opportunity and an obligation to challenge the way we look at the future of health care in this nation." Because the team is dedicated to thinking and talking about new ideas and groundbreaking approaches, including those from nontraditional sources and fields, he says Pioneer enables the Foundation to make conceptual leaps and take risks in grantmaking that would otherwise not be possible. 

Dr. Dwayne Proctor 

Dwayne Proctor, Ph.D., M.A., a distinguished educator and researcher, is team leader for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Childhood Obesity Team. He believes that the Foundation’s work presents a unique opportunity to “focus on the needs of the underrepresented in ensuring quality health and health care for all Americans.” As the Childhood Obesity team leader, Proctor guides the team toward its strategic objective of reversing the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015.

SPEAKER:  Greg Costikyan, "Design for Serious Games" 

Greg Costikyan is CEO of Manifesto Games, a start-up devoted to creating a viable path to market for independently developed games. Prior to founding Manifesto, he was a games researcher for Nokia; and prior to that co-founder of Unplugged Games, one of the first mobile game start-ups in North America. He has designed more than 30 commercially published board, roleplaying, computer, online, and mobile games, including five Origins Awards winners; is an inductee into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame; and at the most recent Game Developers Conference, received the Maverick Award for his tireless promotion of independent games. His essay, "I Have No Words and I Must Design" is used across the globe in game studies classes, and he has written on games, game design, and game industry business issues for publications including Wall Street Journal Interactive, the New York Times, and The Escapist, as well as chapters to books including SECOND PERSON and BUSINESS AND LEGAL PRIMER FOR GAME DEVELOPMENT. He is also the author of four published science fiction novels.

Much of what gets produced by the serious games community frankly sucks. I'll demo three games, one of which is dreadful and two quite good, and use these as a spring-board to talk about the nature of games as a medium, what games do well and what they do poorly, I'll discuss how to design a game with an essentially didactic purpose that takes advantage of things that games do well -- the exploration of process, and the way they make the player complicit in creating the experience --while avoid bolting a message onto otherwise mundane gameplay.

SPEAKER: Eric Zimmerman: Gaming Literacy: Why thinking like a gamer is more important than you think

The idea of educational games traditionally looks into the "magic circle" of game-playing from the outside. It studies how to make games that can effect players for the better, helping them acquire information, learn social or cognitive skills, or otherwise grow and improve. The notion of gaming literacy reverses this equation: it instead contemplates what happens when we step inside the magic circle and look at the outside world from the point of view of a game. Gaming literacy in this sense - the kinds of thinking and being that emerge from playing games - represents an emerging form of literacy that will be a crucial part of what it will mean to be literate in the coming century. Using examples of both digital and non-digital games, this talk will explore three key concepts: Systems, Play, and Design, as components of gaming literacy. In addition, the talk will offer a sneak preview of Gamelab's unreleased title, Gamestar Mechanic, a multiplayer online experience that lets players quickly and easily create their own games.

 
Eric Zimmerman has been working in the game industry for thirteen years. He is the co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Gamelab, an independent game development company based in New York City. Gamelab creates and self-publishes innovative singleplayer and multiplayer games that are distributed online, on mobile phones, and through retail, including the hit downloadable games Diner Dash, Miss Management, and Jojo's Fashion Show. Pre-Gamelab titles include SiSSYFiGHT 2000 and the PC title Gearheads. Eric has taught courses at MIT, New York University, and Parsons School of Design. He has lectured and published extensively about game design and is the co-author with Katie Salen of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press, 2004), and The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (MIT Press, 2006), as well as the co-editor of RE:PLAY (Peter Lang Press, 2004).