Exertion Games Lab

Last night we created a new and improved version of “Hanging off a Bar” in a 1-night hackathon. The goal of the game is to “hang on” as long as you can, not letting go and falling into the virtual river below you. There are some rafts coming by from time to time, on which you can jump to rest, but you have to be quick, as they keep moving and you have to jump back up onto the bar. Winner is who can hang on the longest. We will show this game at the Open Day and use it afterwards to explore the relationship between exertion investment and particular game elements.

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Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller from the Exertion Games Lab was invited to jury the Demo Hour in the Interactions magazine for the current issue.

In the User Experience in Games lecture organized by the Exertion Games Lab, students were challenged to redesign the hand-dryer experience in a playful way. They came up with some amazing ideas on how to turn a task-focused activity (how can we dry hands faster and more effectively?) into an engaging play experience, see the pictures.

Eberhard Graether, a very talented multimedia student from Austria specializing in games in augmented reality, will join the Exertion Games Lab later this year. We are very excited to have him on board.

His great portfolio is at http://egraether.com/ and his twitter id is @egraether.

We are having a brainstorming meeting on Fri, 5th Aug, 3-4pm in 14.11.04 to think about a mobile exertion game that we can bring to the table for peace.facebook.com. If interested, get in contact with Floyd.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller gives a talk on “User Experience and Games” on 29 July 2011 to the Design degree students from Jeremy Yuille at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. 13:30-16:30 in room 9.03.04b.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller gives a talk on “Research in Games, are you serious?” on 26 July 2011 to the Honours degree students at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. Venue is 56-07-98 from 4.30 to 5.30.

Interested in getting writing done? Every morning, 9-10, Mo-Fr, the Exertion Games Lab offers the Writing Club, where you are invited to join others to “just write”, whether it be an academic paper, grant application etc., motivated simply by fellow writing-sufferer’s presence and the feeling of not writing alone. Writing Club – the next best thing after Fight Club.

The Exertion Game Lab is seeking students from RMIT who are interested in designing a mobile exertion game for the peace.facebook.com initiative from the Persuasive Technology Lab initiative at Stanford. If interested, get in contact with Floyd.

The URL exertiongameslab.org is now live, and the website is up!

The Exertion Games Lab opens at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia!