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SOUTH FREEPORT, Maine - Ben Sawyer helped train the next generation of university leaders, worked to school Cisco employees in binary math and is hoping to help at-risk youths avoid the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases. For him, it's all a game - a serious game. Sawyer is the co-founder of Digitalmill Inc., a game design consulting firm that is focused on the "serious games" space."

Excerpted in Google Books: "Learn to design games for tablets from a renowned game designer!Eager to start designing games for tablets but not sure where to start? Look no further! Gaming guru Scott Rogers has his finger on the pulse of tablet game design and is willing to impart his wisdom and secrets for designing exciting and successful games."

Software design and platform to help with game design for mobility-disabled users

Combined video game and computer science course with emphasis on iPhone/iTouch

Practice simple social skills with iPad game, designed for toddlers on autism spectrum

Q. So you designed the game and programmed it yourself? A. I did all of the art and background, I programmed the levels, I did the music, the timing. I outsourced the programming to a company in New York. I pretty much did everything I could possibly do except the raw coding itself.

Exploration of mobile games and uses in business and marketing, including "gamification." "Video games have ceased being an end in themselves; they are a front in the battle to dominate technology platforms and delve into consumers' psyches."

" Female consumers represent 40 percent of the market," but are underrepresented in industry

Based on a recent paper from MIT

"Digital technology empowers one to access vast amounts of on-line data. From a learning perspective, however, it is difficult to access meaningful on-site information within a given context. The Hypercontextualized Game (HCG) design model interweaves on-site resources, translated as content, and the digital game. As a local game design process, HCG builds on the resources available on-site (context) and transfers them beyond their origin (hyper). A successful example is the HCG stories in LieksaMyst, an application developed for the Pielinen Museum, in which the player is guided through a series of activities by a virtual host from the historic past. It took three years of extensive work and research for the LieksaMyst HCG stories to mature from brainstorming concepts to a fully-fledged museum service. Curators, educational technology experts and a total of 476 visitors (from 6 to 77 years old) contributed to the design process. The analysis of the context and feedback from the visitors enabled us to choose media, content and activities suitable to the Pielinen Museum. Our findings indicate that quality time, sincere reflection and communication between local experts and potential players, are indispensable when designing a HCG based game. The analysis benefits researchers and practitioners who are interested in the ways in which a game can bridge the gap between people and relevant on-site information"

"The article will illustrate and explain how we worked with research and our own and secondary literature to create a game that had the potential to create social change. The game Junomi was designed to address the problem of loneliness among Danish teenagers and create opportunities for the families to play and experiment with the ways in which they communicate together. The game is a location based smart-phone game that takes place in players' everyday environments around the city. Players invite close family members to play for an agreed period of time (for example a week or a couple of months). Throughout the game period, players create questions, each with three possible multiple choice answers, and place them on a map to be found by other players. When other players pass by the question locations on their everyday routes around the city, the questions pop up on the phones."

"A new iPhone game that turns players into pathogens keen on destroying humanity has gone viral and its creator and locals say the app does a better job of teaching users about disease than terrifying them. In the two weeks since its release, Plague Inc. has become the top paid app for iPhones."

Abstract: "Brain Quest is an active smart phone game designed to promote both physical activity and executive function in 10-11 year old children. This paper describes the user centred design process which involved a team of psychologists, HCI experts, physical activity specialists and thirty four children over a period of 18 months. Results of two preliminary studies are promising, suggesting that BrainQuest is enjoyable, promotes moderate physical activity and has the potential to provide cognitive scaffolding of the key executive function (EF) skill of multitasking."