Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller from the Exertion Games Lab has been invited to talk at GameDays 2012 co-hosting Edutainment 2012 within the context of Where Science Meets Business on 19 Sept 2012, in Darmstadt, Germany, hosted by the Fraunhofer Institute and the University of Darmstadt, Multimedia Communications Lab.
We’re proud to announce that Chad and Floyd from the lab will be holding a workshop on Play in Unconventional Spaces in November as part of the ACM conference OzCHI 2012 in Melbourne, Australia. We are now doing a call for participation! Please feel free to share it with your friends and colleagues!
ABSTRACT
Playful activities generally occur in defined play spaces. In particular, digital play has traditionally been confined to arcades and living rooms. The advent of recent technologies such as mobile devices allows us to play anywhere. However, the spaces in which we play inform the play experience, yet the relationship between play, technology and unconventional play spaces have received little attention so far. Spaces that afford playfulness are seemingly expanding along with our understanding of play in our culture. As a result, designers are required to rethink where, when and with whom we play when designing playful interactions and experiences. We are proposing a workshop to bring researchers and industry participants together to discuss how to design playful interactions for these expanding unconventional play spaces. The workshop will aim to support the development and understanding of future research, work and collaboration in designing playful interactions for unconventional play spaces.
WORKSHOP GOALS AND TOPICS
Recommended goals and topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
• To provide a space for an exchange of ideas about play, games, and designing interactions that revolve around unconventional play spaces
• To gain a broad understanding of the issues and potential challenges faced when considering unconventional play spaces as a design space
• To raise awareness and appreciation of digital games and playful interactions in unconventional play spaces
• The role and significance of space in regards to play in our culture and society
• How to design playful interactions that do not intrude non-players’ spaces, and if they do, how to use it as a design opportunity
• How to design playful interactions that incorporate, invite or engage non-players
SUBMISSION
Interested researchers and practitioners are invited to submit a position paper or case study paper (2-4 pages) formatted according to the OzCHI format (which can be found here: http://www.ozchi.org/submit/submit.html) and email the organisers (listed below) by October 1, 2012. The papers should focus on current research activities, opportunities and/or interesting aspects of future work. Authors of accepted workshop papers will be notified on October 26, 2012.
Submission Deadline: October 1, 2012
Notification of Acceptance: October 12, 2012
Camera-Ready Papers Due: October 26, 2012
Workshop: November 26, 2012
ORGANIZERS
Cagdas ‘Chad’ Toprak, Exertion Games Lab, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia – chad@exertiongameslab.org
Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller, Exertion Games Lab, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia – floyd@exertiongameslab.org
More information regarding the conference, dates and venue can be found on the website below:
http://www.ozchi.org/
http://www.ozchi.org/tutes/workshopsandtutes.html#w3
Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is presenting an invited talk an “How Sports and Computer Games Meet” at Sportsinformatik 2012 at the University of Konstanz, Germany, at 13 Sept 2012, from 9-10am.
The Exertion Games Lab won both the Student Games Design Competition Award as well as the Audience Award at the ACM supported research conference “Fun and Games” 2012 in France! Chad Toprak and Josh Platt won the Student Games Competition Award with Bubble Popper, and Chet De Mel, Amy Huggard and Jayden Garner won the Audience Award with Musical Embrace. The latter win is particularly remarkable as Fun and Games is a research conference and the three winners have not even started their postgraduate degree yet. Also, Chad Toprak and Josh Platt did a very engaging presentation of their paper at the conference. Congratulations, in particular to those who helped with the development of the games back in Melbourne: Alan Chatham, Wouter Walmink, Eberhard Graether, Andrew Lewis, Hsin Yang Ho, Eric Dittloff, Sevcan Ali, Daniel Beilharz, Luke Dominic-Butterworth, Paco Casares and Nicolas Hower.
The Exertion Games Lab’s Joggobot wins the Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Award 2012!
There are only 3 winners, who share the prize money, and we are getting invited to attend the award ceremony in Finland in October. The award is sponsored by Nokia and quite prestigious in the Ubicomp world, this is what they say about themselves:
“The 6th Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Awards competition, NUMA2012, seeks for novel ways to combine ubiquitous computing to media. We are looking for disruptive artistic visions as well as clever near-to-market solutions off the beaten tracks! This includes any range of innovative ubimedia, pervasive, or ambient products and services.”
All very exciting!
The Exertion Games Lab will be well represented at the Fun and Games conference 2012 in Toulouse, France, supported by ACM, with the following publications:
Toprak, C., Platt, J., Mueller, F. 2012. Bubble Popper: Considering Body Contact in Games. Fun and Games 2012. Short paper. 4 pages.
Toprak, C., Platt, J., Mueller, F. 2012. Bubble Popper: Considering Body Contact as Game Ingredient. Fun and Games 2012. Student Game Design Competition. 5 pages.
Toprak, C., Platt, J., Mueller, F. 2012. Bubble Popper: The Body Contact Experience. Fun and Games 2012. Demonstration. 1 page.
Toprak, C., Platt, J., Mueller, F. 2012. Designing Digital Games for Public Transport. Fun and Games 2012. Work in Progress. 3 pages.
Huggard, A., De Mel, A., Garner, J., Toprak, C., Chatham, A., Mueller, F. 2012. Musical Embrace: Using Social Awkwardness as a Game Ingredient. Fun and Games 2012. Student Game Design Competition. 5 pages.
The papers are now also on the publications page.
Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller has been invited to present a keynote at Gamedays and Edutainment, the “International Conference on Serious Games and Edutainment”, from 18-20 Sept 2012.
Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller has been invited to present a keynote at the “Sportsinformatik” conference in Germany from 12-14 Sept 2012, where he will be talking about “Exertion games – Where computer games and sports meet“.
The Exertion Game Lab’s Joggobot will be featured on Channel 10’s Scope on 30th August 4pm, which is a science education TV program for children. This fits nicely with our theme to excite young people about science and technology while also getting them off the couch and exercise more. We are in the aptly named episode “Cool Machines”.
Bernie DeKoven, fun theorist, game designer and lecturer, blogged about Musical Embrace: http://www.deepfun.com/fun/2012/07/musical-embrace-musing-about-newer-games/
Angelina Russo writes about the Lumahelm:
“I first saw this helmet being photographed only about 4 weeks ago and am absolutely thrilled by the amount of publicity it has received. As a designer I was initially struck by its elegance and ultimately mesmerized by the sophisticated approach to visibility. Congratulations to Wouter and to the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University.”
Both of our student games from the Radical Games class and the Exertion Games Lab have been shortlisted to be presented at the research conference
Fun and Games 2012 in Toulouse, France, in the Student Game Design Competition.
The games are Musical Embrace and Bubble Popper, and congratulations to the students involved!
The Joggobot made it to SBS yesterday, check out the video and the article below to find out more:
Jogging robot sets the pace
Channel 10 TV visited the Exertion Games Lab again today, filming Chad talking about