Colloquia Archive
Serious Fun and Games at IU
September 12, 2008
AbstractWorldwide interest is soaring in video games and virtual worlds as tools for research and learning. In a few short years, games have emerged from the relative obscurity of interactive tutorials. They are now used to study real-world systems including economies, diplomacy, and politics and are used as full-fledged interventions designed to alter human behavior. Lee Sheldon is a writer and game designer who creates content, often in collaboration with researchers. In addition to his commercial career, he has been a co-principal investigator or consultant on six “serious” games and virtual worlds. Prof. Sheldon will present those projects, as well as his own virtual world Londontown, an unapologetic commercial enterprise with a serious hidden agenda. His theme is that, for serious games to succeed, they must be as much fun as games built for profit. The inability of the vast amount of serious games to achieve this goal stunts their efficacy. In exploring how to do this, we will have some fun with serious games.
BiographyLee Sheldon has designed and written 18 video games including a successful series based on Agatha Christie novels. Other titles include the award-winning The Riddle of Master Lu, Dark Side of the Moon, and Wild Wild West: The Steel Assassin, and The Light Files. He has worked on massively multiplayer worlds for companies such as Cyan (URU: Ages Beyond Myst) and Disney (Disney's Virtual Kingdom), as well as an experimental multiplayer X-Box project for Microsoft. His book Character Development and Storytelling for Games is used as a primary text book in game design programs. He is a contributor to Game Design: A Practical Approach, Second Person, and Visual Storytelling. Lee has written and produced over 200 popular television shows, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, Charlie's Angels, and Cagney and Lacey. As head writer of the daytime serial Edge of Night he received a nomination for best writing from the Writers Guild of America. Lee is currently a professor at Indiana University where he leads the design of the virtual world, Londontown and the ARG, The Skeleton Chase, under a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He is Creative Consultant on a new Sci-Fi Channel reality show called Danger Game; writing and designing his fourth Agatha Christie videogame; and writing his second novel The Keys.
