OUWB Brings Campus Innovators Together for Training on Serious Game Tool
by Meghan Louttit

03/07/06 - Ohio University Without Boundaries has taken the leap into serious game development. They will be joining the GRID Lab, along with other groups on Ohio University’s campus that are concerned with innovative technologies, in a two-day training session with game-developers Cyberlore, to learn a new tool that will allow these groups to quickly create game-based, conversational learning simulations.

Eric Marcoullier and a small team of developers from Cyberlore were be on campus March 16 and 17 for two afternoon sessions, the purpose of which is to teach the organizations and individuals interested how to use this new tool, which will allow whoever uses it to create these games without a huge staff of developers behind them.

“At the end of the session, participants should be able to create complex characters using our tool and then go crazy with the platform,” stated Marcoullier.

And according to OUWB Design Coordinator, Christopher Keesey, the training session will “give us a greater knowledge of the tools and theory behind Cyberlore’s conversation methodology and how to create non-linear conversations between characters in games.”

Numerous other campus organizations have signed up to join OUWB and the GRID Lab in this training session, including the Aesthetics Technologies Lab, VisCom and Instructional Technologies. Individual students not representing a specific organization, but who are interested in gaming technology, will also be in attendance.

“The goal will be to inspire a handful of students and get them working on actual projects,” said Marcoullier. These projects could be for their own personal portfolios, coursework or even something created for OU.

This developing partnership, which materialized out of a chance meeting between OUWB officials and Marcoullier while all were attending a meeting at the GRIB Lab, will produce many benefits not just for the organizations and individuals involved, but also for the university itself.

“The best thing is that we’ll develop a community of able units and organizations on campus that are capable of creating high-end serious games under the name of OU,” said Keesey.

The training session will make these groups and individuals, which come from all over campus, aware of each other. And with the growing popularity of serious game use in the educational and corporate worlds, that awareness and cooperation between them will only help to catapult OU to the forefront of serious game development in higher education.