Games in our lives

Last year the Entertainment Software Association reported that 65% of U.S. households play video games today and that the average age of a game player is 35 years old. In the United Kingdom BBC reports that 59% of 6- to 65-year old play one form of video game or another.

These numbers are growing and are very likely to continue to grow: a recent report shows that a staggering 97% of the 12-17 age group in the United States play one form of video games or another.

To play video games has become the norm; to not play video games has become the exception – Jesper Juul 2010.

Why not do something serious with this?

On a rather irregular basis, we at Concept7 organize an open podium at our office in Paterswolde. Usually one of the employees prepares a story to tell, goal is to share some specific knowledge.

This time we invited guest-speaker Rob Willems. Rob is currently self-employed as innovation coach and lecturer at Hanze Hogeschool in Groningen. He did a great talk about serious games.

Why design a serious game

Whereas most games are designed to be entertaining and fun, a serious game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. These purposes can vary a lot depending on the strategy they are part of.

Purposes and goals of serious games can be abstracted. Serious games are ment:

• to inform;
• to train and educate;
• to change attitude and behavior.

Known industries that make use of serious gaming as part of their strategies are defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, religion, and politics.

Did you know the US Army has been designing serious games for centuries already to train military personel? Actually, the first serious game is often considered Army Battlezone, an abortive project headed by Atari in 1980. These days the US Army uses this kind of games to train a soldier’s tactical approach in conversations during war time.

Serious games for blind and sighted kids

Rob told about a project he’s working on at this very moment. Together with his team, he’s designing a Wii game for blind and sighted children . Goal of the game is to improve the children’s physical skills and make it more fun to play video games with friends and family.

During their research they were often amazed by the skills these blind kids do have. In some occasions they just can’t keep up with their friends who are not visually impaired. An often heard critique: ‘My friends let me win now and then, but I want to really win, by myself.‘. Their research resulted in a few objectives:

• The game has to be challenging and engaging, both for blind and sighted kids;
• it needs to have a positive effect on a blind kid’s physical skills;
• they must play it together.

During the project they held design and brainstorm sessions at four families in The Netherlands. Both blind and sighted kids took part during these sessions. It was amazing how many great ideas these kids themselves came up with. Ideas varied from medieval hide-and-seek games to sports related ideas.

The overall conclusion was that sound would play an important role in these games. They did several experiments with sound and found that there had to be sound all the time. Otherwise the blind kid would think the game had broken or ended.

One of the big challenges would be to keep the sighted kid just as excited about the game as the blind kid. They found that perhaps they could give the sighted kid visual cues (which the blind kid doesn’t see) and give the blind kid auditive cues (which the sighted kid doesn’t hear). The project is still running and will be finished this summer.

Serious games in healthcare

Also in healthcare, serious games are used to train personnel. Head2Head developed software which let’s doctors virtually perform surgery. Tasks vary from picking up tiny things alone, but also working together on tasks.

Serious games are sometimes used to distract patients during painful moments. We saw an example of a soldier who had serious burning injuries. Every time the bandages had to be replaced, nurses let him wear a virtual reality helmet. The patient was distracted but also when measuring brain activity, they found that the patient actually felt less pain…

In The Netherlands there’s a project called CAREN (Computer Assisted Rehabilitation ENvironment). A lot of boundaries during revalidation of a patient, are mental problems. Anxiety prevent a patient from doing certain things.

The projects involves a virtual environment in which a patient is asked to perform tasks in a gaming environment, the game involves full-body movement. They found that people are much more likely to do certain movements in a gaming environment than they would in the real world.

Below you’ll find a video about the CAREN project, it’s spoken in Dutch but the visuals say a lot so go ahead and watch it.

Great talk

We had a great afternoon filled with great examples and insights. Whenever you’re interested in Rob’s talk, you can invite him for your company as well. You can contact him through his company’s website.

Sources

Wikipedia
A casual revolution – Jesper Juul

All alarm bells ring when we read our country is losing her position on the international innovation ladder. In the year 2000 Holland used to be in fourth place, but these days we let Scandinavian countries like Finland, Sweden and Denmark in front of us.

At Concept7 we thought it would be a great idea to discover their secret, so we decided to organise a ‘user innovation’ workshop in cooperation with the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies.

You can attend it, but there’s only 2 seats left so don’t miss out and contact us today.

Two innovation experts Niels Krøjgaard en Jacob Suhr Thomson will reveal their secrets in a one-day workshop on friday September 25th at our office in Paterswolde, The Netherlands (50km from the German border). They’ll discuss 19 practical and directly usable methods which can be used during your innovation process. These methods will learn you to see things from a user’s perspective and even let them involve directly. Their innovation methods have proven to run any innovation engine.

All the information you need: The ‘User Innovation’ workshop will be given by the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies on friday September 25th 2009 (9:00h until 16:00h) and hosted by Concept7 in Paterswolde.

Costs per person: € 599,00 (ex. vat).

Are you ready to get that innovation motor running within your organisation? Send an e-mail at stefan[at]concept7.nl or call Stefan Wobben at +316 463 40 998.

Additional information

During the last 10 years Niels Krøjgaard has worked in the advertisement industry as a project manager, producer of television commercials and as a creative idea and concept developer.

Niels has made several presentations and his courses are mostly about structured idea development. His participants’ creativity has always been kickstarted by his simple methods and tools. His courses mix theory and practice in a way that makes problem solving easy for anyone attending.

Jacob Suhr Thomsen works on a project for the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies. The project is about doing research in the construction sector and practices user-driven innovation. He regularly does presentations about Desuden futures studies, creativity, online cultures, user-driven innovation, and the knowledge society.

Storing and finding back these ideas can sometimes be a real hazard. Even though we as human beings are much better at recognizing visuals cues above written documents there’s not so many storage materials and furniture available to help us efficiently store and refind the paperwork.

At Concept7 we think we’ve found a solution for storing the most common forms of sketches and prototypes.

• Idea sketches
• Magnetic strips to carry sketchboards
• Sketchboard carrier to store old sketchboards
• Concept7 sketching paper
• Archive boxes to store idea and concept sketches

Idea sketches on flickr.com

We photograph every idea sketch that is made during a session right after the ideation session. On flickr.com we create a private group for every project we work on. We tag the sketches with a tagstructure based on the framework we used to generate the sketches in the first place. A good tagging structure helps us find back sketches very quickly.

Once the best ideas are picked we hang these sketches on our walls so we can easily see context between them. Some time ago Adaptive Path coined the word and technique sketchboard (movable sheets of paper containing idea sketches), a technique we’ve adapted and use almost daily during the ideation and prototyping phase.

Sketchboards attached by magnets

We use magnets and metal strips on the wall to attach sketchboards. Even though it’s good to hang these sketchboards on your office’s wall, it’s sometimes handy to put them away when working on more projects at the same time. Also when finishing up a project it can be handy to put them away but not too far so you can reach back to them. Magnets allow us to easily remove and attach these sketchboards.

Sketchboard carriers

We’ve designed sketchboard carriers which can contain approximately 20 sketchboards at a time. Only sketchboards we’ve stopped working with for a long period will be stored permanently. By rolling the sketchboard and writing the project title on the outside we can easily grab back to older sketchboards.

Concept sketches in archive boxes

When we present concept sketches (or paper prototypes) to our clients we use our A3 concept7 sketching paper. We keep the originals at our office. A paperclip is used to wrap them together and a post-it serves as a label, concept sketches are labeled with a project title, and a date stamp. The idea sketches we’ve created (and photographed) earlier in the process also fit very well in these boxes.

These days our offices look a bit cleaner than they used to…

I decided to base the grid on a 4 pixel interval, every 4th gridline (every 16th pixel) is a fatter line. This makes it easy to create 3 column (320px), 4 column (240px), 5 column (192px), 6 column (160px) grids on one type of paper. The screen is 960px wide.

I hope you’ll all enjoy this sketching paper, I will create an A4 version in the coming weeks.

Concept7 A3 sketching grid paper (290Kb, PDF)

The sketching paper still goes well with 960.gs’ other templates.

We decided to head for downtown Groningen and have a little brainstorm during a cup of coffee. After an hour of brainstorming we still had no steady set of ideas to build a little concept. Suddenly one of the crew shouted ‘Let’s clone one of us! We’ll have a crowd in no time.’. From that point the camera’s started running…

My collegues hadn’t forgot the discussion and gave me a Zundapp Bergsteiger on my birthday. Unfortunately it’s out of business for the moment. The engine’s on the ‘kitchen table’ waiting for someone to fix it… I’m sure it will be fixed within a few months so I can take it for a ride to Concept7 which I’ve promised when I got it.