“Games for Good” Conferences

Every year this time a few of us from HopeLab leave homebase here in Redwood City for an East Coast swing through two game conferences we love: Games for Health and Games for Change. I didn’t make the trip this year – instead, I’m detailed to represent HL at the Move Your App! Developer Challenge we’re cosponsoring with Snaptic; more on that in another post – but our veteran road warrior Ellen LaPointe did. (On a side note, this year the Games for Health and Games for Change event schedules actually overlapped a bit – why not combine the two into one big “Games for Good” meetup? Now there’s an idea.)  

At Games for Health, Ellen took the stage with a few HL collaborators and colleagues to moderate a panel on “Designing for Impact,” a look at how game producers, researchers, healtchare businesses and designers think about creating products that have meaningful impact. Reporting from the road, Ellen tells me about 100 folks turned out for the session and the dialogue between panelists Sven Newman of Daylight Design, Andy Swanson of Bayer HealthCare, and Jason Langheier of Fitness Forward was rich and well-received. Later in the day, Ellen and Sven hosted a second session, walking attendees through the HopeLab-Daylight collaboration on Ruckus Research, our project to gather human factors insights on kids lives and their attitudes about physical activity – a key piece of work that continues to inform our development work with Zamzee (formerly gDitty). Given the growing interest in “active gaming” to get people moving (hello, Project Natal!), it was a great opportunity to share what we learned through in our Ruckus Research project.

So, another informative, inspiring trip to the Games for Good events – looking forward to next year!