Serious Games Initiative And Games For Health At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2005

Media Advisory

May 12, 2005

The Serious Games Initiative and the Games for Health Project will be present at E3 in Booth 6861 located in Kentia Hall. These efforts are the leading advocacy and support networks for game developers and customers utilizing games, game talent, and game technologies for non-entertainment purposes. Over the past few years the use and interest in game related technologies for fields like healthcare, education, homeland security, business analytics, and advocacy have been growing.

FAST FACTS:

Where: Kentia Hall, Booth 6861 during E3 Expo, Los Angeles, CA

When: May 18-20 during expo floor hours

Contact: Ben Sawyer <<a href="mailto:bsawyer@seriousgames.org?body=Help Games Press get even better. Tell everyone you use it.">bsawyer@seriousgames.org>

Our press briefings at E3 offer a one-of-a-kind opportunity to obtain information about this growing story. We will have videos, screenshots, hands-on demos, and background materials for all visiting press.

Please feel free to stop by unscheduled but scheduled briefings allow us to prepare for your attendance.

CONTENT:

At E3 2005 members of the press will be able to see actual demos of serious game projects, and get a full background briefing on the state of the field, and next-generation projects that are underway. This briefing can help with general stories or serve as starting points for ideas for unique stories on specific projects, events, and people involved with the growth of serious games.

Among the many titles and projects which are expected to be showcased are:

• Splash - an underwater scuba environment used for pain distraction during chemo treatments

• Shield of Freedom - a U.S. Coast Guard communications training game

• Safety Training - Vstep, a Netherlands based software development company uses various 3D game engines to power safety training applications for emergency and oil rig workers.

• Hungry Red Planet - This CD-ROM game teaches children about proper nutrition

• A Force More Powerful - Game developed to help training non-violent tactics for bringing down repressive regimes worldwide

• Revolution - By modding NeverWinter Nights MIT has created a curriculum tool for teaching American history.

• Project:Connect - This non-profit series of games is designed to teach children how a variety of Internet technologies operate.

• Incident Commander - A homeland security application that will train municipal officials nationwide how to handle the management of catastrophic accidents or emergencies in their regions.

• HazMat - Training for first-responders built using the Unreal game engine.

Our presentation will showcase what serious games are, the size of the market, key organizations and development studios, serious game efforts in Japan and Europe, the use of traditional commercial off-the-shelf games like Animal Crossing and Civilization, and much more.

ABOUT THE SERIOUS GAMES INITIATIVE

The Serious Games Initiative is housed at The Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars Project on Foresight and Governance. It is assisted by Digitalmill, a game industry and development consulting firm based in Portland, Maine. While the Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the video game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy. The Serious Games Initiative is located on the Web at http://www.seriousgames.org

ABOUT GAMES FOR HEALTH

Games for Health is a project produced by The Serious Games Initiative (http://www.seriousgames.org), a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars effort that applies games and game technologies to a range of public and private policy, leadership, and management issues. The Initiative founded Games for Health to develop a community and best practices platform for games being built for health care applications. To date the project has brought together researchers, medical professionals, and game developers to share information about the impact games and game technologies can have on health care and policy. In December of 2004 The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded a grant to help underwrite the Games for Health Project.