Water Cooler Games has some coverage of the Serious Games Summit talks, featuring some presentations on what Serious Gaming is, was, and should be. Serious Gaming is gaming intended to train or educate the player, instead of only to entertain. Some of the interesting ones were:

• Johnny Wilson and Noah Falstein talked about using pieces of older games—conversational interaction, for example—as building blocks to design newer games for everyone. They also touched on ethics and point of view, putting you in the shoes of other people and giving you insight as to what their thought processes were.
• Eric Zimmerman, James Paul Gee and Katie Salen discussed kid's modifying and creating simple games as a form of media literacy. Making kids think about interactions between various elements, possibly with a game they sketched out that put you in a game designer's shoes.
• Nick deKanter, Andrea Lauer and Kurt Squire presented the idea that putting history in context with WWII games helped certain kids significantly improve their understanding of geography and history.

More after the jump.

• Jack Emmert (of City of Heroes/Villains fame) pontificated on designing for human behavior in games. He mentioned a fear of talking to other people when going online, which hinders grouping in MMORPGs.
• Mia Consalvo conversed on cheating on both online and offline games. She came up with various groups of cheaters, and classified them into purists (everything's cheating), code is law (it's in the code already so it's not cheating), and cheaters (you can't cheat a machine, only other people).

Jason Chen

Day 1 [Water Cooler Games]

Day 2 [Water Cooler Games]

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