RIT professor Stephen Jacobs is the editor-in-chief of a new journal, The Computer Game Education Review. Here's the blurb he sent me on the publication:

Online submissions for the inaugural issue are open until December 1, 2009.

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Insurance company Liberty Mutual has created Driver Seat, which they bill as "the world's first senior driving simulator." The game strives to recreate the perceptual and reaction limitations of drivers aged 65, 75, or 85 through four scenarios (suburban, wilderness, urban, outskirts) each with several missions.

It's a nice idea, and the implementation is attractive, but the problem is that the cars in the game are difficult to control in any circumstance, as is the case in many Flash games of this style. Some of the minigames, e.g. the first-person game that simulates a lack of peripheral vision, work more effectively. But all in all, it's hard to separate the hard-to-control-on-account-of-age from the plain old vanilla flavored hard-to-control.

(via Game Culture

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A bit late, I suppose, but I wanted to post my notes from the Documentary Games panel at last month's Games for Change festival.

These are rough notes, but they should be sufficient to give you a gist of the sessions. You can find them after the jump.

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Humana's games for health division has announced a new contest, Insert Coin for game concepts that meet the broad goal of to "get people to be more physically active, or motivate them to make healthy decisions."

Entries are open from June 11 through September 9, 2009, and prizes total $10,000. More information can be found on the Humana Games for Health site.

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I've known for some time that hospitals have used videogames for some time as experimental tools to help children relax before surgery. But PediSedate has developed an entire product around this idea. Here's how they describe it:

It looks like a purple snorkel, of sorts, as depicted in the equally awesome logo at top right, which depicts the triad of values, "Distraction - Comfort - Sedation." Maybe they should make a version for the US military as well!

(via io9)

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I'm here at the Games for Change 2009 Festival in New York. Today kicked off with a keynote by New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Nicholas Kristof. Below is my rough capture of the session; my goal wasn't to capture what Kristof said verbatim, but the sense of it, so please treat it as such.

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In my 2007 book Persuasive Games, i discuss a wonderful advergame for the Britvic pacer-drink J2O. The game challenged the player to pee accurately into a toilet after drinking pint after pint of beer. The advertised product, a sort of fancy sugar water, helped with recovery in the same way . I don't think the game's online anymore, but you can read about it in this old press release.

Well, now there's a version of a similar concept for iPhone: Drunk Sniper. Same type of gameplay, but now you can play in the toilet stall too. Available now for 99¢ in the App Store.

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In beautiful 1960s styling, here's Bailout! a new boardgame.

Hard to tell much more from the website, but it looks like an American-style path game rather than German-style strategy game. Shipping next month for $35.

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Wow, another educational game that doesn't suck! Check out 1066, a game produced by Channel 4 in the UK to promote and accompany a television program of the same name, about the Norman conquest.

The game is beautiful and quite complex, featuring both single-player and multiplayer battles. If I have a complaint, it's that I wish as much effort had gone into teaching the player to play as went into the awesome narrated intro. I still haven't figured out how to successfully instruct my archers to fire (and yes I read the instructions). Still, go play it.

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Long in development, I've finally completed and released Guru Meditation, my re-imagining of a game from Amiga lore. I've released the game simultaneously on Atari VCS and iPhone. The Atari version is a numbered, limited edition of 10 that comes with console, Joyboard controller, custom yoga mat, and instructions. The iPhone version is availble 99¢ on the iTunes App Store.

A lot more information can be found on the game webpage, including the history of the Joyboard, inspiration for the game, and my commentary on this and other meditation games.

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