This weekend I traveled to Boston for the Virtual U. conference.  Virtual U. is what’s come to be known as a ‘Serious Game’ – a game created not to make a profit, but for the purchase of teaching/training/advocating.  Virtual U. itself was funded by the large Sloan Foundation, is given away for free, for the purpose of teaching a generation of administrators, faculty, and students how a typical American university operates.

I started to type up a longer summary of  the conference (and some prior, related conferences I’ve attended), but realized that an adequately long summary would probably be of interest to only about a dozen people.  I’ll  just throw out a few quick conclusions:

• Gaming will be used for serious purposes, and the growth of this subsector of the gaming industry will outpace the overall industry for the next decade, at least.
• Only a very small fraction of real-world problems are suitable for Serious Games.  The trick is to figure out one that is a good fit, then find someone to fund a game to address it.
• Virtual U itself is a mixed bag – a good early pioneer in the field, and partially successful at its goals, but too much of a simulation and not enough of a game.
• I suspect other projects in this field will have Virtual U.’s issues, because game designers are currently heavily outnumbered in the field by content experts, funders and organizers.  The latter have good intentions, but lack the vocabulary and expertise to express their ideas in game-terms.  Of the roughly 50 people at the conference (it was small), I was one of only 3 game designers.  Note to other game designers – therein lies opportunity. 
• One of the goals of the conference was to generate forward progress – new Serious Games in the academic instruction/leadership field.  Unfortunately, the mismatch of problems and solutions revealed itself again, as there were several would-be funders for a community-college oriented game, but few others (including game designers) interested (I personally think the subject is decent, but not ideal for a Serious Game).  Conversely, there were a good group of subject matter experts and designers talking about a high-school simulation game (which I do think could be very useful/viable), but no funders.