IWNASG 2012 - International Workshop on New Approaches to Serious Games (IWNASG 2012)

IWNASG 2012 will be held in conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Web-based Learning, ICWL 2012
2-4 September 2012, Sinaia, Romania
Games are structured contexts where players have clear objectives, with victory as end goal. In a game, players must overcome challenges and face opponents (real or game characters) but always respecting a clearly-defined set of rules. Failure to follow these rules implies a punishment or penalty. Games can involve one player acting alone, two or more players acting cooperatively, or players or teams of players competing between themselves. Games can offer an incredibly immersive and engaging environment where users ‘learn by doing’ and from their own mistakes in a controlled environment that is able also to improve teamwork, social skills, leadership and collaboration.
Serious Games focus on the design, development, use and application of games for purposes other than entertainment. Education and training represent the main areas of application of Serious Games but they have been used, with success, for health, research, emergency planning, advertisement and military purposes. The most striking effect in the use of Serious Games is an increased motivation and engagement. As such, Serious Games require specific design, recreating real scenarios through interactive and/or immersive environments. However, in spite of the existing evidence of success, there is still a limited use of Serious Games. This has mainly to do with social concerns and stereotypes about the relation of games and serious purposes. Other issues relate to physical and cost barriers, hardware and license cost, access (for online games), maintenance and support. But this limited use is also related to the lack of extended evidence of effective application.
The International Workshop on New Approaches to Serious Games is a multidisciplinary approach to the presentation of research, theory, application, practice and validation in the field of Serious Games for any level and any area. As such it will cover areas like cognition, psychology, technology-enhanced education, evaluation and assessment, multimedia and information technology.
Submission deadline: 15 June, 2012
All accepted papers presented at the workshop will be included in the conference proceedings to be published as a volume in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).