The Serious Games Summit, a part of the Game Developers Conference, offered keynotes and multiple tracks for game design, the business of games and learning theory. 

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) this year had an adjunct, the Serious Games Summit (SGS), co-located at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center, on the two days before the main GDC started. The SGS had keynotes and multiple tracks for game design, the business of games and learning theory, in keeping with its challenging mission of blending the fun of gameplay and the seriousness of using games to teach. The record crowd was an interesting combination of government and business executives in dark suits, university professors in pullovers and game developers in black T-shirts with skeletons and skulls on them.

The business category of Serious Games, though much smaller than its entertainment games cousin, is obviously booming. Serious Games, which first found use for military learners, are now being produced for a whole panoply of applications, including medical students learning surgery, lawyers practicing court procedures, firefighters encountering hazardous materials, Navy personnel trying to keep aircraft carrier decks in order and pharmaceutical salesmen trying to explain products with tongue-twister names. Hundreds of companies are springing up in the U.S. and Asia to meet growing demand and major schools are starting classes to train game producers, animators and writers to specialize in the many new applications that are arising almost weekly.

The following is small a sample of the many presentations, themes, producers and games that were discussed at this year's Serious Games Summit at the GDC.

One of the most interesting presentations was "The Future of Collective Play," by Jane McGonigal, who was part of the I Love Bees creative team at 42 Ent., and now works for the San Francisco Bay Area's Institute of the Future. I Love Bees was a huge success for the new game category of ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), using the www.ilovebees.com website to lure hundreds of thousands of players to the viral game, which involved delivering clues via pay phones and other multimedia outlets worldwide. Online cooperative communities formed almost overnight to solve a series of puzzles, which then led to other clues and further puzzles, somewhat like the movie The Da Vinci Code, and, like that move, involved moving around in geographical areas. The game contributed materially to the game it was created to promote, Microsoft's Halo 2, which exceeded $100 million in its opening weekend. McGonigal was both a designer and played the role of an in-game ethnographer, spending numerous hours as a virtual prisoner in her (real-life) apartment, listening in to the communities that formed online and sending feedback from the players back to the game designers, who had to keep creating new content because the player communities solved puzzles much more quickly than anyone had expected. McGonigal earned a PhD from UC Berkeley for her pioneering ethnographic study of the strange world of gamers, somewhat like Jane Goodall did for her immersion in the strange world of primates.

I Love Bees was a huge success for the new game category of ARGs which used a website to lure hundreds of thousands of players to the viral game. © 2007 Microsoft Corp.; © 2007 42 Ent. Llc.

"I design games from the future," said McGonigal in her keynote. She has become expert in the development of collective intelligence, or CI, sometimes termed crowd-sourcing, which describes the collaboration of very large numbers of people, each of which may have only a small part of the overall picture but contributes to the whole. Examples of CI in addition to I Love Bees are Wikipedia and Google Image Tagging; there are many examples of CI in the animal kingdom, including, of course, beehives. CI characteristics include massive multi-user environments, social data gathering and analysis, and creative, often unexpected results. McGonigal referenced two other experts in the field, Dr. Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, and Vernor Vinge, who penned Rainbow's End, both of whom argued that humans would increasingly use CI to solve problems in the future. Jenkins believes it should be taught in schools.

ARGs can be incredibly complex and sophisticated, McGonigal noted. The I Love Bees community split into three groups, each of which had a different hypothesis about what the first clues, consisting of series of numbers, meant. Each formed a message board and gathered data. Eventually one group figured out that the numbers were GPS coordinates for pay phones, which in turn provided other clues. Remarkably, players that came to erroneous conclusions did not feel discouraged. "The game was very inclusive," McGonigal stated. "Every player felt that he or she had played a part." The design process of I Love Bees was very different from that of conventional games. "Usually there is a formal line between the designers and the users of a game," she said. In contrast, this design team interacted very tightly with the player community, even re-designing parts of the game to incorporate elements that emerged during game play, such as a wiki created by the players.