Transcript, Backchat and Thoughts on David Wortley and Serious Games Institute

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The complete transcript of Monday's Metanomics session with David Wortley and his Serious Games Institute is now available. Here is a very early part of the exchange:

BEYERS SELLERS: And can you give us some examples of the types of games that SGI is already involved in producing or plans to be producing soon?

DAVID WORTLEY: Yeah, I can. But before I do that I should just make it clear that the institute is a public/private partnership. We don't actually develop the games and environments ourselves. What we do is work with industry to support the development of those games, so we act as kind of intermediaries and brokers. But the typical kinds of applications that are being developed with the companies that we work with are Serious Games for training people in entrepreneur¬ship, business skills, health related activities. We have a company that specializes in games for teaching people how to handle trauma injuries in the battlefield or first responders, how to respond to an explosion in a high street and treat casualties. We've got a really wide spectrum of applications that we operate in.

Much of the remaining discussion was on the substance of, and market for, serious games. To those who have been following this industry, the greatest opportunities appear to be military and emergency-response applications, with business applications also in the mix (though my impression is that they are far behind). Also, David talked at length about his efforts to proselytize on the serious games front, getting for-profit, educational and government sectors to see they value they can have.

But part that I found particularly novel and interesting was David's description of the way this group is working--not actually producing serious games, but serving as a support to an industry that is in a position to re-energize the West Midlands economy (which had been reliant on a now-downsizing automotive manufacturing sector), and are moving into...games!

To me, this is a mark that governments (in this case, a regional UK govt) see real growth coming in this area.

I wish David--and the West Midlands--the best of luck!