Via: htxt.Africa
The first edition of the International
Conference on Serious Games in South Africa took place on August 27-29 at the Quest
Conference Estate.
The conference – the first of its kind in the
country – was hosted by the Serious Games Institute – South Africa, a unit within the Faculty of Economic Sciences
and Information Technology on the Vaal Triangle Campus of the North-West
University (NWU Vaal).
Topics addressed at the conference included
the utilization of Serious Games in higher, secondary, primary and pre-primary
education; the health sector; business and industry; social issues and cultural
awareness as well as the psychology of Serious Games.
The conference featured the game design expert
Dr. Ernest W Adams as its keynote speaker. Adams, who started the International Game Developers
Association (IGDA) in the US in the 1990s, holds a Ph.D. in interactive
storytelling and has more than 25 years of experience in the game design
industry, having worked as the lead designer at Electronic Arts.
According to Prof Herman van der Merwe,
Executive Dean of the Faculty and the Conference Chair, “Advances in technology
have made it possible for individuals, groups and even communities to have game
processing power within their reach.”
Gaming in South Africa is a growing industry but is still a long way
behind the rest of the world.
HOUZZ-IT
- A Fine Example Of A South African Serious Game
HOUZZ-IT! is SA's exciting new online property game that aims to demystify the world of real estate, giving you the keys to property
success
Developed by Sea
Monster studio, HOUZZ-IT is
a Serious Game to learn how to become a property tycoon by successfully managing
a property portfolio.
It was commissioned by Property
Junction with the specific aim of exposing people to some of the challenges
of buying and selling houses, giving them a taste of the sort of processes they
will encounter in the real world.
Their goal was to encourage players to find out
more about the property market by showing them that essentially the
more they know about it the more money they stand to make in the
long-term.
HOUZZ-IT uses turn-based gameplay to take players through buying
homes, decorating them, dealing with problems that arise and managing their
finances in order to make more money to buy more properties. Along the way
players learn about bonds, interest payments, tenants, how improved amenities
translate into more rental and other concepts central to successfully
managing a property portfolio
Htxt.africa article
excepts - More than just $$$
According to hxtx.africa, Sea Monster found while play-testing the game that
players didn’t respond very well to the idea of simply making a ton of cash. So
they added in story elements that provided a bit of non-monetary context to
players’ motivation.
Vuyo the teacher, for instance, is an in-game
character who dreams of using the profits from his property portfolio to build
a school in an underprivileged area, giving players an intangible yet emotionally-satisfying reward
for being successful, something testers responded positively to. As developers
stated during their presentation at the International Serious Games Conference
“Never underestimate the power of making someone feel like a hero for doing
their job.”
Because HOUZZ-IT is a South African
game, it presented Sea Monster with the opportunity to get a number of
companies involved in the property market on board in such a way that
their branding appeared in the game (a fantastic way to secure funding for the
project), but not in a way that detracted from the mechanics. Nedbank, for
instance, is the in-game bank people apply to for home loans.
HOUZZ-IT! is
available for playing online on its official website or via Google
Play Store