Euan’s Blog

Earlier this month I attended a few of the sessions at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival.  A couple of really good talks, a lot of very bland talks and some truly awful stuff.   (the worst chairperson I have ever had the misfortune to listen to at the games actually session)

Most of the key talks, discussions were transcribed live at http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/. 

One of the highlights for me was Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot candid talk about the company’s plans and breadth of development in terms of user generated content, their plans to branch into film, cross platform development, the size and talents of their development teams and the increasing need to expand the market and develop for the casual gamer, the family and women and in general those who could be described as time constrained gamers…and it is here that in terms of games/learning it becomes interesting. 

This theme of the importance of getting value beyond the game was re-iterated by other contributors, including Ubisoft’s head of casual gaming Pauline Jacquey talking about targetting female gamers and the so called ‘casual gamer’.  The success of Nintendos brain training games are used as examples of this.  

All this bodes well for the acceptance of games in the mainstream as a valid way to learn.