serious play

Serious Play Conference

A few episodes ago I had the pleasure of speaking with Sue Bohle about the Serious Play Conference. The conference in its sixth year was hosted at UNC Kenan-Flagler business school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The conference moves around every year so I was very excited that it was in my own backyard this year. While the conference wasn’t exclusively about creating serious games for healthcare there were a number of speakers there talking about the games they were developing.

In today’s podcast, I have an interview with for brilliant minds who are using gamification, a term will be discussing shortly, to help individuals with learning, education, engaging, and managing health and behavioral challenges. My four guests are Doug Watley with breakaway games, Lynn Fiellin with the Yale Center for Health and Learning, Dan Scherlis with the “Breathe Free” game, and Randy Brown of Virtual Heroes.

This is just a small selection of the many speakers and attendees present at this conference. I encourage you to find out more about “serious play” and “serious games” Give a listen to my interview with Sue Bohle.

Breakaway GamesMy first interview is with Doug Watley the CEO of breakaway games. His game “Vital Signs”, was just awarded one of two best in show awards.

Play2ProtectOne of the sessions that fascinated me was the discussion of how a 2-D player game was created to help at-risk middle school-aged children work through scenarios of behavior choices and what the consequences would be. Let’s learn about Lynn Fiellin’s Play2Protect game.

Breathe FreeI had a really interesting conversation with Dan Scherlis he is both a professional game developer and now a health games executive producer. It’s very interesting thoughts on the word game of vacation and told me about a game he’s working on “Breath Free” to help smokers try to quit. We even talked about good versus evil.

Virtual HeroesMy last interview is with Randy Brown of virtual heroes is a fascinating spinoff of Epic Games Unreal Engine creating virtual worlds to help teach and connect individuals in a variety of professions from the military to public service to healthcare. His company, Virtual Heroes is working with the Duke School of Nursing on an IRB study for Type II diabetes support in a virtual world. Let’s hear what Randy has to say.

Thank you for listening to get social health I hope you found serious games for healthcare as interesting as I did. As a reminder go give a listen to my other podcast with Sue Bolla the executive director of the Serious Play Conference.

I’ve published over hundred episodes of Get Social Health. There have been a lot of fascinating, fun and interesting conversations with healthcare practitioners, digital health thought leaders, physicians nurses and healthcare professionals who are actively using social media to further their healthcare messages. When you visit the get social health.com website you’ll find on the right-hand side a search bar so type in a topic and will be able to find some really great interviews.

If you have a suggestion for an interview either a topic or an individual I’d love to hear about it please reach out to me via [email protected] one thing I would ask is for you to take the time to give me a review or rating it helps other individuals find the podcast and we could always use a few more listeners. I appreciate your listening today have a great week.

Serious Play for Healthcare

Healthcare has many serious challenges that serious play can help solve.

The Serious Games Association (SGA), lead by Executive Director Sue Bohle,  is an international trade organization serving the entire serious games industry. Members include developers, publishers, technology providers, analysts, authors, consultants, faculty and other professionals. Their members are involved in the making of games and sims for education or at home learning, corporate training and marketing, government and military uses, healthcare and medical training and games that are designed to create positive change in our society. The association produces educational conferences (notably, the Serious Play Conference) does research and provides support to special interest groups (SIGs) and committees studying how to move the industry ahead. The 2016 conference will be co-hosted by the UNC Computer Science Department at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, July 26-28.

Serious GamesWhat is serious play? According to the event website it’s a gathering where creators can have critical conversations about game design and share their knowledge with peers. The focus of the conference is exploring opportunities, challenges and the potential of game-based learning. At Serious Play, attendees listen, share and participate actively in informal sessions dedicated to the discussion of the future of serious games. We are a leadership conference for people who design, manage and implement serious game programs. Their goal is to provide a forum for visionary educators, chief learning officers and heads of training programs in health care, government/military or other fields that want to learn how to improve the effectiveness of their program, and use the data collected to do even better.

Podcast Time Stamps

Listen to the podcast or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
00:51 Meet Sue Bohle & the Serious Play Conference
03:55 What’s the difference between Serious Games and Serious Play?
04:40 Phaedra Boinodiris of IBM
Serious Play05:15 How is healthcare using serious games?
06:54 Serious cognitive brain games
08:00 Children very comfortable with technology. What about seniors and technology?
09:45 My parents are addicted to Solitare on the computer
11:00 Gamifying lessons about serious asthma for children
11:54 Teaching at-risk teens, social-emotional intelligence
12:42 Adults need emotional intelligence games as well!
14:04 The Serious Play Conference
15:00 Who will be attending the conference?
16:08 What other business verticals are addressed at the conference?
18:00 What is a “Game Jam”?
19:15 Are serious games all digital?
21:05 How are these games being funded?
22:28 Startup Weekend style pitch events?
23:21 Find out more about the Serious Play Conference
24:05 Get a discount for listening to this podcast!
24:36 Follow the action in Twitter
25:15 Playing games while learning
26:00 Social Media Tip: Erin Wold – “Be a real person”
26:25 “Social Media Ambassadors” – Capitalize on social media during a conference or event

Find Sue: