Taking Fun Seriously

You can tell that people are taking something seriously when they start holding conferences in Washington, D.C., and charging hundreds of dollars to attend.

There is an upcoming conference there on October 31 and November 1 called the Serious Games Summit. Early birds can attend for $595 plus travel expenses. They have quite a lineup of speakers.

It's interesting to note the various tracks that you can go to. One of the tracks is Learning and Instructional Theory, which they highlight as follows:

At the heart of any serious game is a combination of exciting new ideas about learning and well-defined existing instructional methodologies. This track illustrates how the worlds of cognitive science, instructional design, and game development can work in unison to build better learning environments, applications, and methods. It also analyzes the inherent learning in games and the many metagame aspects to learning that inhabit the field.