GDC 2005: Serious Games Summit - Design-O-Rama

Design-O-Rama
Hosted by Ben Sawyer

In this session, designers presented their solutions to some serious game design challenges which had been posed to them earlier in the week. Unfortunately, I didn't catch the whole session, so I won't dwell on this too much. Supposedly, these designs will make their way onto the Serious Games wiki, but that hasn't happened yet. Here's a quick rundown of the parts that I saw:

America's Army for Teaching - The client wanted a tool to recruit potential teachers and give them some idea of what a career in teaching would be like. The solution was a community-based, puzzle MMO (think Puzzle Pirates) for teachers and pre-teachers.

3rd World Microfinancing Advocacy - The client needed a tool to introduce 3rd world microfinance administrators to the challenges and benefits of picking the right people for their loans. The solution was called something like "Sim Village" and modelled the effects (and ripples) caused by giving microfinancing loans to certain families.

Terrorist Trainer - The client wanted a training program that would train military types in terrorist tactics. The idea was that by teaching our military to think like terrorists, we'd be better able to combat them. The solution was a three-tiered design that involved both FPS and RTS gameplay at different levels. Honestly, I thought the problem was more interesting that the proposed solution.