 or call 1-888-286-3540 Dates & Details
The Serious Games Tutorials will take place throughout the Spring and early summer of 2007 in several different locations around North America.Locations & Dates San Francisco, CA March 28-29, 2007 Orlando, FL April 26-27, 2007 Washington, D.C. May 8-9, 2007 Toronto, Ontario June TBA, 2007 Pricing Admission starts at $445.00 for early bird registrants and rises to $695.00 closer to each individual tutorial. Discounts Group discounts for three or more registrants from the same organization are available. Please contact Beth Bryant for more information. |
The Serious Games Tutorials is a tutorial series designed and produced by three leading figures in the serious games sector. We have four decades of experience designing commercial and serious games between us and have completed projects for several U.S. government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, major non-profits, and some of the world's leading game studios and publishers.
Each of our instructors brings their unique strength and experience to our two-day class. By combining this insight attendees can expect to draw upon both their unique and shared experiences helping other organizations use games and game technologies to solve challenges shared by many.
Ben SawyerBen Sawyer is the co-founder of The Serious Games Initiative. Along with co-founder David Rejeski of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Sawyer is widely credited with defining, branding, and helping grow the modern day serious games field. Among his notable accomplishments in the serious games space Sawyer created the first-ever Serious Games Summit, and co-founded the Games for Health Project and its associated conference. Sawyer was the producer and manager of Virtual U a major serious games project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that resulted in a game-based university management simulator.
Since the creation of Virtual U Sawyer has designed serious games projects on a wealth of different topics including Internet technologies, chemistry, the U.S. federal budget, unmanned aireal vehicles, networking, science, and more. In addition to being one of the most sought after speakers on the topic of innovative roles for games and game technologies Sawyer has been a critical source on the subject for many major media outlets including CBS News, The New York Times, USA Today, and NPR. In addition to his work on serious games Sawyer has provided private consulting on the commercial games industry to many major companies both within and outside of the entertainment sector.
A lifelong gamer since the age of five Sawyer lives in Portland, ME with his wife and two sons.
Noah FalsteinNoah Falstein began his career in game development in 1980 at Milton Bradley Company. Since then he has worked in a variety of roles, including programmer, writer, project leader, producer, creative director, executive producer, and most frequently, designer. Falstein was among the first ten employees at Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts Entertainment), The 3DO Company, and Dreamworks Interactive. He was project leader for the classic arcade game Sinistar, the PC titles PHM Pegasus and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and co-designer of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. He has had the privilege of working with a wide range of notable game developers, educators, writers, and filmmakers, and has even led brainstorming sessions with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
Falstein frequently gives talks and teaches classes around the world, often on subjects involving game design and interactive storytelling. He was the first elected chairman of the CGDA (now International Game Developers’ Association). For the last five years he has also written the Design column for Game Developer Magazine, the biggest trade publication for the games industry. He is on the advisory boards of both the Games for Health conference and the Serious Games Summit.
As of the October 2, 2006 listing of the top-rated games of all time by www.mobygames.com, the premiere site for professional game credit information, Falstein was a contributor to 4 of the top 5 games on the list.
For the last ten years Noah Falstein has run The Inspiracy (www.theinspiracy.com), a consulting firm specializing in game design and production assistance for entertainment and serious game titles. His clients have run the gamut from entertainment (Sega, Disney, Dreamworks Interactive, LucasArts Entertainment) to corporate (Intel, Shell Oil, BTS), to serious game developers (Health Media Lab, Hopelab, Vision-Play, Morphonix) to government (NIH, FAS, DARPA). A sampling of some recent titles to which he has contributed include:
- Hungry Red Planet (Teaching nutrition to teens)
- Space Station Sim (Simulation in conjunction with NASA)
- Re-Mission (Cancer fighting game from Hopelab)
- Empire at War (Star Wars game for LucasArts)
- Paraworld (Fantasy RTS game for Sunflowers)
- Freedom Fighter 56 (Serious historical game for Lauer Learning)
- Immune Attack (for Federation of American Scientists)
Bob Bates
Bob Bates began his game writing career at Infocom in 1986. Since then he has written, co-designed, produced, or otherwise assisted the development of more than 30 games that have sold over 2 million copies and won over 55 industry awards, including two Adventure Game of the Year awards. His most recent title is Panzer Elite Action: Fields of Glory, released in 2006, with two more major titles scheduled for 2007.
In 1989 Bob co-founded Legend Entertainment and served as its President until the company’s 1998 sale to Atari. He continued as an Atari executive, Legend’s Studio Head, and an active game designer/producer until the studio closed in January of 2004. He now works as an independent game designer, writer, and producer.
Bob is the immediate past Chairman of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and currently serves as the Chairman of its long-range planning committee. A frequent speaker at worldwide industry conferences and events, he is also the co-founder and organizer of the Game Designer’s Workshop, an annual invitation-only conference attended by many of the top storytelling game designers in the business. Bob is also on the advisory board of the European Games Convention Developer Conference (GCDC), and of Project Horseshoe, a game-designer think-tank.
Bob is the author of one of the industry’s bestselling books on game development, Game Design: The Art and Business of Creating Games, which is currently being used as a textbook by several colleges and universities. He has lectured on game design at MIT, Columbia, and George Washington University, and he is also the editor of the Game Developers Market Guide from Premier Press. Most recently, he co-authored a 200-page report on the Serious Games Industry for a government think-tank.