VS-Games 2012 – GaLA Conference
The ELIOS Lab of the University of Genoa hosts the 4thInternational Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications, VS-Games 2012 (www.vs-games2012.org). The conference will be chaired by Alessandro De Gloria, full professor of Electronic Engineering, president of the MSc course in Electronic Engineering at the University of Genoa. He is also coordinator of the Game and Learning Alliance (GaLA) (www.galanoe.eu), European Union 7th Framework Programme Network of Excellence (NoE) dedicated to Serious Games, computer games ad-hoc designed for education and training.
The conference will take place in Villa Cambiaso, the seat of the Dean of the Polytechnic School of Genoa, Italy, from Monday October 29th to Wednesday October 31st.
The conference has been organized by the GaLA NoE and by the Serious Games Society (SGS) (www.seriousgamessociety.org), an international association that has been recently founded and that will be officially presented during the conference, on Tuesday October 30th at 3.45 pm.
Organization of a conference specifically devoted to Serious Games (SGs) is a significant part of the GaLA vision, given the need of building and nurturing a developer (academic and industrial) community on SGs.
The conference was thought with a specific focus on SGs, given the lack, especially at European level, of an ad-hoc dedicated conference. The aim is to guarantee visibility to the field of SGs and favor community building, also involving industrial interests.
The conference received a huge amount of scientific submissions. This allowed the organizers to prepare seven high quality sessions covering all major aspects of SGs, from theoretical foundations to real-world use cases, as it is shown by the session titles: SGs’ Theoretical Foundations, SG Design Principles, SG Design, SG Engineering, SG Assessment, SGs in Formal Education, SG Application Fields. A parallel poster session will be held as well.
The conference will host three keynote speeches from the top levels of industry and EU. Marco Marsella, Deputy Head of the Unit eContent and Safer Internet of the European Commission Directorate-General for Information Society and Media, will open the conference addressing emerging trends in the EU, in a speech entitled: “Serious Games and gamification of learning: taking stock of latest EU research on Technology-Enhanced Learning”. Pascale Xélot, who is the leader for the European IBM Innovation Centers run by ISV & Developer Relations (IDR), will talk on: “How to use serious games to teach business process management in an Industry context”. Finally, Donald Brinkman, who manages external programs in digital humanities, digital heritage and games for learning at Microsoft Research in the US, will deliver a speech on “Structured Signs and Infinite Games: Serious Play for Lifelong Learning”.
The first day of the conference will be devoted to workshops and tutorials, with academic and industrial coverage. Two workshops will give attendees the possibility of making more in-depth and hands-on activities on the conference topics. The tutorial provides a multi-perspective view on entrepreneurship education through SGs, allowing participants to learn and practice about the whole SG development and deployment cycle.
In parallel to the conference, a SG exhibition will take place, with field cutting-the-edge European and American companies showing their products and doing networking. Business-to-business speed-dating and conference crawling sessions will be held as well.
During the gala dinner, on Tuesday night at the Genoa Diocesan Museum, the GaLA awards ceremony will award the best SG, best scientific SG evaluation and best SG academic paper.
VS-Games 2013 will take place in Bournemouth, in September 2013. GaLA will spawn a new, SG-specific conference, that will be held in Paris in October 2013.
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