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Focus on MassDiGi's efforts to bring together game companies and aspiring students, a panel from the MIT Enterprise Forum will be held on December 1 and feature Becker's Timothy Loew among others.

Phaedra Boinodiris, serious games program manager at IBM, touts the potential of games beyond academia

P. 158 in a long document. Abstract: " 157 Chapter 8Design and Implementation of Mobile Educational Games: Networks for Innovation Rob Harrap 1 , Sylvie Daniel 2 , Michael Power 3 , Joshua Pearce 4 , Nicholas Hedley 5 1 Queen's University, Department of Geological Sciences and Geological Engineeringharrap@geol.queensu.ca 2 Université Laval, Department of Geomaticssylvie.daniel@scg.ulaval.ca 3 Université Laval, Faculty of Educationmichael.power@fse.ulaval.ca 4 Michigan Technological University, Department of Materials Science & Engineering and theDepartment of Electrical & Computer Engineering, USApearce@mtu.edu 5 Simon Fraser University, Department of Geographyhedley@sfu.ca Abstract :" Research networks foster creativity and break down institutional bar-riers, but introduce geographic barriers to communication and collaboration. Indesigning mobile educational games, our distributed team took advantage of di-verse talent pools and differing perspectives to drive forward a core vision of our design targets. Our strategies included intense design workshops, use of online meeting rooms, group paper and software prototyping, and disseminationof prototypes to other teams for refinement and repurposing. Our group showedstrong activity at the university-centered nodes with periods of highly effectivedissemination between these nodes and to outside groups; we used workshopinvitations to gather new ideas and perspectives, to refine the core vision, toforge inter-project links, and to stay current on what was happening in othernetworks. Important aspects of our final deliverables came from loosely-associated network members who engaged via collaborative design exercises inworkshops, emphasizing the need to bring the network together and the im-portance of outside influences as ideas evolve. Our final deliverable, a mobileeducational game and a series of parallel technology demonstrations, reflect themix of influences and the focus on iterated development that our net

Abstract: :In this paper, I draw on an embodied cognition approach todescribe how sound mediates our identification with andempathy for video game characters. This identification isdiscussed in terms of mirror neurons and body schema, drawingon theoretical and empirical research to explore ways in whichidentity is created from our embodied interaction with sound. Iconclude by suggesting ways in which sound designers andcomposers can use this information to create more empathy andidentification between players and their game characters."

From the abstract: "Traditionally, the tasks associated with game AI revolved around non player character (NPC) behavior at dierent levels of control, varying from navigation and pathnding to decision making. Commercial-standard games developed over the last 15 years and current game productions, however, suggest that the traditional challenges of game AI have been well addressed via the use of sophisticated AI approaches, not necessarily following or inspired by advances in academic practices. The marginal penetration of traditional academic game AI methods in industrial productions has been mainly due to the lack of constructive communication between academia and industry in the early days of academic game AI, and the inability of academic game AI to propose methods that would signicantly advance existing development processes or provide scalable solutions to real world problems. Recently, however, there has been a shift of research focus as the current plethora of AI uses in games is breaking the non-player character AI tradition. A number of those alternative AI uses have already shown a signicant potential for the design of better games. This paper presents four key game AI research areas that are currently reshaping the research roadmap in the game AI eld and evidently put the game AI term under a new perspective. These game AI agship research areas include the computational modeling of player experience, the procedural generation of content, the mining of player data on massive-scale and the alternative AI research foci for enhancing NPC capabilities."

"This is a story of four university faculty, two men and two women, and the research team they formed based on an NSF grant opportunity. There is also a cadre of university students that are learning real-world lessons on group roles in a research endeavor."

"Editor's note: Ann DeMarle is director of the Emergent Media Center and associate professor of communication and creative media at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. "(CNN) Talking about Champlain's game development degree programs.

"This is just a friendly reminder that early bird registration for the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Conference ends in 1.5 weeks. This year, we reduced the student and teacher rates significantly. Early bird regular registration is $350, while it is a mere $50 for students and PK-12 teachers." UW-Madison, June13-15, 2012

"Game-based simulation systems are increasingly being used to train users in several applications across government, in- dustry, and academia. Designing game-based training sys- tems that can measurably improve learning while providing an engaging training experience is a challenging problem. In this paper, we describe a novel framework that tightly inte- grates game-based training systems with instructional com- ponents using data analysis to address this problem. Intelli- gent training systems based on this framework dynamically adapt both the training and the instructional components to measurably improve learning in play sessions. We propose a three phase approach to automatically identify points in a play session to predict high-value future scenarios, validate predictions, and prescribe actions. A case study using the KDD Cup 2010 educational data set is described illustrating the e®ectiveness of the proposed approach."

Discusses Turtle Boy Games, a venture to help game design students enter the game industry, in the context of the Mass Digi and statewide efforts to increase collaboration between game companies and academia to create industry and job growth.