Some Websites

Motherboard, for intersting things going on in Norway - news of installations and digital storyltelling.

The Interactive Institute, in Stockholm, Sweden, seems to be a hub for various things, and is linked to the IPerg project, and Nordic Playground, which states as its aim:

to become a Nordic game related knowledge base and a forum for dissemination of research results.

(Essentially for mobile gaming.)

Probably the most interesting bit on the The Interactive Institute website is the guild for reality integrators and generators. This is a group of practitioners in different disciplines, exploring mixed reality. But there isn't a great deal of information of exactly what they are doing.

There's also (as part of the Institute) the Trans-Reality Game Laboratory

a research laboratory specialising in the development of new game forms and technologies integrating virtual and physical modes of game play.

Again, there are links to many of the usual suspects. (Plus one I haven't come across before - Foam.)

I get the impression that many of these have been set up for collaboration, and although there is clearly some going on, it is perhaps more limited than originally intended. Presumably because people are working hard on their own projects.

Serious Games is a term being used to describe games that are used for education and training. The Serious Games Source website is a useful starting point for looking at this area - set to be very big, attracting lots of funding. (Juxtaposing 'serious' and 'games' is quite interesting - the games industry trying to convince the wider world that games should be taken seriously, and linking them directly to education. This is a central tenet of Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design - the fact that games are the way children learn when they are little, but as soon as they get to school, games and learning are separated. As this link states:

Video games generally have a bad reputation as a way for children to spend their time – and therefore their use as a teaching aid within the classroom has been controversial.

It's a way of attracting funding into the industry too. This is also a big thing in education cirles at the moment - how to use the video game format for learning.)

SGS have a couple of relatively interesting articles. The first of these talks about the eLearning sector and its relationship to educational/training games. One thing of particular interest is the use of language, and adapting language use for this sector, so that it is meaningful for educators and trainers. The other one concerns thinking skills, and uses the case study of a British game created and used by a teacher to explore bullying with his pupils.

New games

Ok, so time for some more research. First some new 'pervasive' games. One is Insectopia, which is to be played on mobile phones. It is described thus: Players roam the cityscape searching for and catching a multitude of different insects. The idea seems to be that these bugs are passed on from mobile to mobile, and so they are kind of self generating in a sense. But they must start somewhere, and that is unclear. Although the game seems to have started in Sweden, as it is developed by Interactive Institute, so I guess that's where the bugs came to life, in Stockholm. I wonder how far it has spread? What I particularly like is that you can do a solo search, where you can only collect one bug ecery 3 minutes, or a double search, where you search with a friend who is using their phone too, and you can collect as many as you like. So there's a social side to the game too. Nice.

The other game is called GeoQuiz. This one is described as a location-based mobile game which is playable on Nokia Series 60 phones. So, it needs the symbian operating system to work, and utilises the GSM network to work out where you are - cell ID technology. The point of the game is to leave and answer questions that are specific to a particular place, which makes the game a location-based one - you have to be in a certain place to collect the question and find the answer. The game world link doesn't seem to be working, but I'm worndering whether it only operates at the Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenburg, where it was made.