As mentioned in the past few posts, I did a presentation on [i] The History of Video Games and [b] Serious Games at the Barcamp Derry conference on Saturday. At the end of the talk I promised to upload my slides to my blog, and here they are!  I’ve uploaded them to SlideShare, so they can viewed online or downloaded (by pressing the menu button) for offline/viewing or editing.  You can find them after the “read more” link below, as well as a list of recommended reading.

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Barcamp Derry has been and gone and it was a huge success.  120 people in attendance with plenty of networking  and ideas going on, as well as general friendliness and good will (and free beer).

Thanks to Mark Nagurski for organising the event and thanks to everyone who attended my talk – hope you enjoyed it!  As promised I will be putting up the slides on this blog very soon, as well as a recommended reading list for anyone who is further interested in video games or more specifically serious games.  I’ll hopefully do that within the next few days, time permitting!

I’ll be speaking at Barcamp Derry this Saturday.  What is that? Well, Barcamp Derry is “a free, user-generated unconference for anyone interested in web stuff, technology or digital media”.

My talk is entitled “Video Games – More than just sex, violence, gore, murder, carjacking and World of Warcraft”, and is going to take a two-pronged approach:

History of Video Games - The first half of the talk will be a brief history of video games (or, if you like, the evolution of video games) from Spacewar and Pong to the current generation of games.

Serious Games – The second half deals with the more serious uses games can have in areas such as health, business and education, as well as talking about my current ongoing research at University of Ulster involving games for stroke rehabilitation.

I’m hoping it’ll be fun, and that I don’t make a hash of it.