Do you have an idea for the next 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution', 'Pandemic' or 'Splice'? Get £10K To Make it Happen!

The Wellcome Trust and Develop Conference have a new scheme to develop game ideas inspired by biomedical science into mass market games!  If you are successful in applying you get £10K to develop the idea, mentoring during the process and take part in a live pitch at Develop to a panel of experts including publishers.  You've got until the 26th April to get your submissions in, so best to get moving now!

Develop in Brighton in partnership with the Wellcome Trust brings a Live Pitch event to this year’s conference. Apply for Development Funding and Pitch Your Game at the Develop in Brighton Conference 2013.

Do you have an idea for the next 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution', 'Pandemic' or 'Splice'?

Developers are invited to apply for the chance to receive up to £10,000 each to develop a high-impact pitch for their game to help secure a distribution platform and funding. The ideas for your game need to draw on or be inspired by contemporary or historical biological or medical science in an innovative and accessible way. The games can be developed for any mass-appeal genre, platform or business model. Those who are successful will go on to pitch their developed game ideas to a panel of publishers and funders at a live event at Develop in Brighton on Wednesday 10 July 2013. Panellists joining the Wellcome Trust include Sony XDev and crowd-funding platform Indiegogo. Participating developers will be invited to receive additional pitch training ahead of the live event.

More information and details of how to apply are here: http://bit.ly/Zqvzj1

Gamify Your PhD Launches

At the Develop Conference yesterday, the Wellcome Trust project we have been producing launched:

The Wellcome Trust invites researchers to gamify their PhDs 11 July 2012

An innovative new way of communicating science research launches today with Gamify your PhD, a project from the Wellcome Trust which brings together researchers and games developers to create new games exploring and explaining the latest developments in biomedicine. The Trust is inviting researchers to share ideas for games based on their PhD work in biomedical science or the medical humanities, and small teams of games developers to turn these ideas into addictive, challenging and educational games. Those selected will partner at a two day hack in which the games will be created. The best of these will receive funding to develop into a releasable game.

To help inspire ideas and give researchers a flavour of what’s possible a web-app http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/gamify, developed by Mobile Pie, has been commissioned, offering an interactive and fully embeddable guide to the nuts and bolts of mechanics and motivation that lie behind successful game design. The web-app also features sample 16bit mini games to illustrate the different elements of gaming, including a Darwin inspired survival of the fittest pigeon game, a Mendel genetics puzzle game, a game based on Asch’s work on conformity, and a Newton-targeting apple game.

Gamify your PhD is part of a wider commitment by the Wellcome Trust to using games and gaming culture as a means of engaging people with science. A range of awards schemes is open to developers interested in creating innovative, entertaining and accessible games based around biomedicine and medical history.

Daniel Glaser, Head of Special Projects at the Wellcome Trust said: “The engaged researcher has lots to learn from gaming and game design can benefit hugely from the latest scientific advances. That’s why the Wellcome Trust is throwing its weight behind this innovative interaction. Today’s brightest researchers understand that science does not take place in a vacuum and the best research can engage with the most popular culture. I’m very curious to find out what these teams will come up with.”

Tomas Rawlings, the Wellcome Trust’s gaming consultant said: “Science and games are a natural fit, both are about the participant seeking to understand the rules that govern the world they find themselves within and achieving this by experiments such as trial-and-error. Gamify your PhD is an exciting twist and evolution of these areas.”

The deadline for applications from researchers and developers is 12 August, and the games hack will take place between the 3-4 September 2012. The resulting games will be made available online. All details about the scheme and the web-app guide to gaming can be found at www.wellcome.ac.uk/gamify

The project’s twitter hashtag is #gamifyyourphd

To see the project's web-app click here.

More more see here.

The Anatomy of Fun: FeedBack

Yesterday was the Anatomy of Fun session at Develop.  We've had a couple of good articles written about the session from LazyGamer:

At the Develop Conference, researchers have stated that they’ve been able to measure that magical element that’s missing from some games, fun.

And Beefjack:

In a panel today at the Develop Conference, some really clever sciency research types have been talking about how they can measure the notion of “fun” in a game – and the interesting trends they’ve discovered by doing so.

It also got a good reaction on twitter; here is a flavor of that discussion:

The Anatomy of Fun starts in 1 hour at #Developconf in Room 4 - http://t.co/YvFHrZiA see you there!

— Tomas Rawlings (@TomasRawlings) July 11, 2012

Switched from the Raspberry Pi talk to the fun panel at the last minute. Screwed up @developconf’s system no doubt.

— Jurie Horneman (@jurieongames) July 11, 2012

Fun being linked to 'flow', not surprisingly. Also looking at GSR to identify fun scientifically. #developconf

— Chris Lowthorpe (@chrislowthorpe) July 11, 2012

IMHO we’d need to look at the origins of that single value / dopamine level. Or, at least, I’d find that useful.

— Jurie Horneman (@jurieongames) July 11, 2012

Key in fun is reward prediction errors - gap between expectation and reward. Interesting. #developconf

— Chris Lowthorpe (@chrislowthorpe) July 11, 2012

All rewards are uncertain. #developconf

— Jurie Horneman (@jurieongames) July 11, 2012

fun is the thing that all great games have in common, so look for the barriers to fun and remove them #developconf

— Tomas Rawlings (@TomasRawlings) July 11, 2012

@TomasRawlings But does that prohibit them dealing with serious subjects?

— Chris Lowthorpe (@chrislowthorpe) July 11, 2012

Panel agrees it’s difficult to define fun. #developconf

— Jurie Horneman (@jurieongames) July 11, 2012

'Anatomy of fun' panelists at #developconf highlighted importance of thinking about wider range of gamers, esp. older and disabled #a11y

— Ian Hamilton (@ianhamilton_) July 11, 2012

Panel agrees it’s difficult to define fun. #developconf

— Jurie Horneman (@jurieongames) July 11, 2012

Develop 2012 Panel & Workshop

Wellcome has a couple of great events going on at Develop.  As well as the workshop we mentioned before, there is also a panel of the 11th too.  Here is the full information:

The Anatomy of Fun Wednesday 11 July 2012, 11:00 – 11:45 in Room 4

Chair: Jo Twist, CEO of UKIE Marek Bronstring, game design consultant, former Head of Content at SEGA Europe. Paul Croft, Co-Founder of Mediatonic Graham McAllister of Player Research Robb Rutledge, neuroscientist.

How important is fun to a game’s success? What do we even mean when we say a game is fun to play? And how easy is it to engineer fun? This panel explores the secrets to keeping players entertained and coming back for more. We hear from neuroscientists and games developers as they share their different insights and perspectives. What is science revealing about the many elements required to make an experience fun? And what do those at the front line of gaming find are the best ways to keep their players playing – whether in casual mobile games, immersive RPGs or any other gaming experience?

And:

Wellcome Trust Workshop: How Do You Make Science, Play?

Date: Thursday 12 July 2012, 14:00 – 16:00 at Develop, Brighton

From Deus Ex to Portal, science has inspired a vast array of successful games and sometimes in quite unexpected ways. This hands-on workshop explores how contemporary science can be mined for compelling ideas by games developers, going from concept to design. Whether as the inspiration for a game or for content supporting a bigger game, this workshop will see you collaborating with top scientists from across the country to develop novel ideas.

The session includes a presentation with Preloaded as they explain how a close collaboration between games makers and content specialists resulted in their latest game, Axon. There will also be a chance to find out how you can access the Wellcome Trust’s funding streams to develop science-inspired gaming ideas further.

Please note there is limited space available for this session. If you would like to attend, please email Develop@wellcome.ac.uk, with subject heading ‘WORKSHOP’.

How Do You Make Science, Play?

We're going to be taking part in this event at the Develop Conference on 12th July. Why not sign-up and join in?:

Wellcome Trust Workshop: How Do You Make Science, Play?

Date: Thursday 12 July 2012, 14:00 – 16:00 at Develop, Brighton

From Deus Ex to Portal, science has inspired a vast array of successful games and sometimes in quite unexpected ways. This hands-on workshop explores how contemporary science can be mined for compelling ideas by games developers, going from concept to design. Whether as the inspiration for a game or for content supporting a bigger game, this workshop will see you collaborating with top scientists from across the country to develop novel ideas.

The session includes a presentation with Preloaded as they explain how a close collaboration between games makers and content specialists resulted in their latest game, Axon. There will also be a chance to find out how you can access the Wellcome Trust’s funding streams to develop science-inspired gaming ideas further.

Please note there is limited space available for this session. If you would like to attend, please email Develop@wellcome.ac.uk, with subject heading ‘WORKSHOP’.

Develop Panel Post on Wellcome's Blog

Tomas has written a follow-up post about the Develop Conference event for Wellcome's blog:

Our panel brought together an eclectic group of people representing different facets of gaming. We had the outgoing Channel 4 Commissioning Editor for Education and founder of Makielab, Alice Taylor, Demis Hassabis, games developer and neuroscientist (and Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow), Phil Stuart of Preloaded and industry veteren Jez Harris.

We looked at how games can talk about the bigger questions, morality and mortality. Preloaded gave us a preview of their new game The End, which looks at the biggest question of all: death. The panel also explored the issues around how the brain deals with the new technologies of games and gaming and what impact it might be having on development (though we reached no clear consensus on this).

Also discussed was how best to design games that are more than just fun – that impart knowledge and question assumptions. The consensus was that this is already being done with many games, but fun must still be the driving force! Games are a good way to talk with an audience about such topics, in part because they are interactive and so give the player an opportunity to explore.

Wellcome Trust Panel a Success!

A big thanks to our panellists and all who took part in the Develop 2001 panel discussion and who helped to make the event a great success.  Here is a description of the event from Tomas's blog:

Then was the session I was part of for the Wellcome Trust.  I’d say it was the most eclectic line-up at Develop this year from a neuroscientist (Demis Hassabis) to a new start-up doing 3D printing (Alice Taylor) to mainstream games development (from Jez Harris).  I think it went well, at least the panel did a great job of talking about serious stuff like fun, death, sex and drugs. Paul Canty from Preloaded showed off their fascinating new game for Channel 4, that looks at death; The End.  Demis also gave us some great insight from a scientific perspective on games development saying that games (and digital media) are rewiring our brains in some ways and that the data that can now be gathered from games and gaming can offer insights into not only how to make better (scarier!) games, but also into how our brains work.  Notes on the Wellcome Trust’s funding for making games is here.

It was also independently reviewed by another blogger (our emphasis):

Next stop was a business seminar (I tried to mix up the tracks I attended) entitled “Money for Good Games”. With the support of the Wellcome Trust (a charitable organisation who offer to fund the development of games with a biomedical theme), an impressive panel chaired by Tom Rawlings comprised of Alice Taylor, Dr Demis Hassabis, Jez Harris and Paul Canty discussed the use of games in the wider world in such fields as education, medicine, mental health and death. However, let’s not forget about the aspect of fun in video games. Indeed, Alice Taylor was keen to emphasise the importance of fun in educational games and beyond, saying: “If you’re bored, you’re not learning”, as well positing that Facebook games such as Farmville were “training wheels for real games”, these often causing players to seek out other, more meaty video game fare in the future. It was also interesting to find out that, according to research, 52% of players think of moral and ethical questions during play… so perhaps people really do care when they’re hurling their villagers to their deaths in Black & White (one of Demis’s past projects). Additionally, some research done for the BBC in 2005 allegedly revealed an almost 50/50 gender split in gaming, the latter statistic arguably quite contrary to the usual assumption of all gamers being male.