At the recent Serious Games Summit information sessions, I had the privilege of discussing and highlighting some serious games related activity in Alberta. The following are some notes and links to the information I was able to share.
- 3 major areas of activity in Alberta: research, projects that are similar to serious games and projects that are under development
- at the time of the presentation, no specific completed serious games that had been produced in Alberta, if you know of any please let me know
- research in Alberta appears to be in two major institutions: the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta
- U of C has two areas that have included serious games in their mandate: the Graduate Division of Educational Research and the Digital Media Laboratory
- U of A has not specifically highlighted serious games in any of their work, but one group, the GAMES group, is working on a proejct similar to serious games called ScriptEase
- several organizations have developed projects that are similar to serious games: Alberta Education's Virtual Legislature, AMA's StreetSmarts, Science Alberta's Wonderville, and ShirWin's "OT Inc."
- only one organization has specifically targeted the serious games market and has a product currently under development, Terris Hill Productions Ltd. "SimuLynx - Rig Skills"
- opportunites exist in several areas to address the gaps in research and development of serious games in Alberta
- gaps in research include: assessment of existing products for serious game potential, assessment of current learning designs and how instructional design is affected by new opportunities presented by games, the heuristics of games and the transfer of the skill at playing a game to the skill of actually doing a task
- gaps in current products include: understanding the serious games value chain, production process, intra-market collaboration and more
- gaps in the Alberta serious games sector include: lack of a serious games SIG, lack of coordination between institutions, commercial organizations and government
- opportunities for growth outside of Alberta include: exploration of collaboration between provinces, exploration of marketing Alberta products in the International marketplace
- presented the success story of SimOps Studios Inc. a research group from Carnegie Mellon University that created Hazmat Hotzone
