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credit: Games For Change Festival – A Dream Team of Speakers Who Champion Healthcare
and Citizen Science Games
The 17th Games For Change Festival
kicked-off earlier today. For the first time, organizers made the decision to
go virtual with free registration to all participants, drawing a global
audience to explore, share and learn how we can leverage the power of games and
immersive media for positive social impact!
A most inspiring session at #G4C2020 today was Winning
Against Pandemics: Games as Essential Tools for Planning and Response.
The expert panel discussed the development of games for pandemics,
healthcare in general and citizen science over the last 15 years, including
current high-impact efforts and future directions.
Russell Schilling, Ph.D., panel moderator, has been
involved in developing Serious Games for over 30 years. A retired Navy Captain, he was a program
officer at both Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Defense Advanced
Research Programs Agency (DARPA) where he developed games and VR applications in
STEM, medical training, pandemic planning, and mental health.
Here is the lineup
of luminaries:
Noah Falstein, The Inspiracy President, has
been a video game developer since 1980, and was one of the first 10 employees
at LucasArts Entertainment, The 3DO Company, and DreamWorks Interactive. He
recently served for four years as Google’s Chief Game Designer, working closely
with their AR and VR projects, before leaving the company to pursue health
games opportunities. He is an advisor/contributor to Akili Interactive (ADHD), TrainPain (Pain Remediation), StoryUp
(Empathy), and AdventureLab (hosted VR) among others.
Noah’s current
project is a Stanford-based Citizen Science game to annotate CT scans of
Covid-19 patients.
Seth Cooper is an Assistant Professor in the
Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He was previously Creative Director of the Center
for Game Science at the University of Washington, where he earned his PhD in
Computer Science and Engineering. Seth's
work focuses on using video games to crowdsource the solutions to difficult real-world
problems. He is co-creator of Foldit, a video game that has allowed hundreds of thousands of players to be
involved in scientific research in biochemistry.
Foldit has been
encouraging people to start playing the game as they believe that this could
speed up the process of finding a cure for the novel coronavirus.
Dr. Rhiju Das is an Associate Professor of
Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. His lab focuses on
computer modeling and design of RNA molecules, which code for elaborate
biological machines like viruses, ribosomes, self-replicases, and agile RNA medicines.
Dr. Das leads Eterna, an open science platform that crowdsources intractable RNA design
problems to players of an online video game and provides scoring feedback based
on actual wet-lab experiments.
In response to the
COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Das and Eterna have launched the OpenVaccine challenge
to develop refrigerator-stable mRNA vaccines needed for world-wide immunization. Please find more at Stanford biochemist works with gamers to develop
COVID-19 vaccine
Francesco Cavallari has 20 years of experience in the
games industry having held both technical and leadership positions at Ubisoft.
In 2015 he founded Video Games Without Borders, a nonprofit organization and a
global community of people who believe in digital games to change the world for
the better.
Francesco recently
led the team of volunteers behind Flatten Island, designed to raise funds for nonprofits fighting
against COVID-19.