The Fun & Serious Game Festival was established in 2011 to recognize the best European video games of the year. Awards will be granted to the best productions and most brilliant careers in the video game industry, both for games developed for fun and those fulfilling cultural, educational, healthcare, or corporate purposes.
The Festival Awards Gala will be held at the Campos Elíseos Theatre in Bilbao on November 8, 2011.
On November 8 and 9, Serious Games professionals will get together at the 1st International Professional Conference on Serious Games, to be held in Bilbao, in the context of the Fun & Serious Game Festival.
In its first edition, the event aims at consolidating the video game industry in Spain and the European continent.
The conference will take place at the Euskalduna Conference Centre, next to the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum.
One of the highlights of the Fun & Serious Game Festival is the emphasis on Serious Games and the future prospects of video games developed for purposes other than entertainment.
“Serious games are converging in the virtual world and social networks, and immersive technologies will be used in the recruitment of professionals, evaluation, and continuous learning.” This is the future of the Serious Game industry in the words of the president of the Serious Game Jury, David Wortley, founding partner at Immersive Technology Strategies and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
Those who attend the 1st International Professional Conference on Serious Games on November 8 and 9 will be able to listen to keynote speakers like Wortley himself, Samir Abou-Samra (CTO of DigiPen Corporation USA who has led simulation projects for Boeing and Renault F1), Jurriaan van Rijswijk (director of Serious Games for Health Europe and founding director of Games Factory Online), or Julián Álvarez (ICT consultant specializing in Serious Games at the French consulting firm Ludoscience and regular contributor to the annual report on the Serious Game Market produced by IDATE).
They will describe the contemporary scene of Serious Games and show the most successful applications with users and developers in the fields of health, education, worker training, and the promotion of culture.
Other keynote speakers at the Euskalduna Convention Centre and Concert Hall in Bilbao include the health psychologist Pamela M. Kato, who, after founding HopeLab and being a clinical instructor in Paediatrics at Stanford Hospital in the United States, is currently developing and testing a clinically validated serious game to train medical residents in patient safety; Gareth Mills, who, as head of Futures, Innovation, and E-learning at the QCA, has led major developments in the curriculum in England; Maurizio Forte, professor of World Heritage at the University of California, Merced, and of Virtual Environments for Cultural Heritage at the University of Lugano; and Tim Luft, who at Coventry University has supported the development of economic regeneration programs and has delivered projects in partnership with the European Union and UK Trade & Investment.