GRAND CNI Dr. Lennart Nacke opening the 2013 Gamification conference hosted by the University of Waterloo. Photo courtesy of the University of Waterloo.
(Vancouver, BC) GRAND is pleased to have been a partner in the sold-out Gamification 2013 international gaming conference in Stratford, Ontario (October 2-4, 2013).
Approximately 150 participants attended the first-annual conference hosted by the University of Waterloo. The conference is Canada’s first comprehensive event focused on the growing area of gamification and the exploration of "gameful" thinking, research, analysis, and best practices. Gamification uses game design to make non-game tasks more fun, engaging, and motivating.
The conference drew both industry and academic professionals interested in human motivation and the power of gameful design and digital games. Many of the latest developments in Canada’s gamification research, design and technology were also showcased at the event. With conference attendees from around the world, including North America, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Germany and Australia, the conference had a strong international impact.
"Games can enhance people's lives and work in ways that people are only now starting to understand,” said Dr. Lennart Nacke, Conference Chair and Research Director of the GAMER Lab at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. “With this conference taking place right now and right here in Canada, we are able to form an international community and help kickstart the research in motivational user experience design informed by games.”
Nacke, a GRAND researcher, was key in helping launch the conference as an official Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Special Interest Group on COMPUTER-HUMAN INTERACTION (SIGCHI) event. Other Gamification 2013 partners included the CDMN (Canadian Digital Media Network), IMMERse (Interactive and Multi-Modal Experience Research Syndicate), The Games Institute, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), the GAMER Lab (UOIT), and the University of Waterloo.
Over 40 speakers from eight countries presented at the conference, including several from the GRAND network. Network researchers, students, and postdocs presented on ongoing interdisciplinary research at Dalhousie University, OCAD University, Ryerson University, Simon Fraser University, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, University of Saskatchewan, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, and University of Western Ontario.
The highly diverse program line-up included over 50 sessions on topics that include: best practices of exergames, workplace and classroom gamification, privacy and copyright, social game mechanics vs. traditional leaderboards, games for social awareness, and business applications.
Keynote speakers included American author and social game designer Amy Jo Kim, whose design credits include Netflix, Rock Band, eBay, Yahoo!, and Ultima Online, as well as Dallas-based designer and consultant Stephen P. Anderson, author of Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun and Effective User Experiences.
“With the support from large Canadian research networks like the GRAND NCE and IMMERSe, we were able to make this the game conference that everyone was talking about last week,” said Nacke.
Building on this momentum, plans are in the works to launch a larger conference series called CHI PLAY that will run for the first time in Toronto in October 2014. The event will integrate a number of international conferences around game research in human-computer interaction.
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GRAND Contact
Spencer Rose
Communications Officer
GRAND NCE