Abstract

This workshop will start by addressing the history and developments that occurred in the board game culture and industry, focusing on the hobby board game innovations. The main characteristics, mechanics, and mechanisms of these new games will be analysed and explained in order to allow participants to consider and implement these designs in the development of new serious game solutions. The knowledge should be useful for analog, digital, and hybrid game development.

Curriculum Vitae

Micael Sousa is a researcher from CITTA/University of Coimbra and a Ph.D. candidate currently working with analog serious games for planning processes. Micael Sousa has been developing training sessions using and adapting modern board games for serious purposes and multiples objectives, like soft-skills training, board game design, and collaborative planning approaches, through which he won in 2019 the Portuguese national trainer prize. He is one of the founders of Asteriscos association and the Boardgamers de Leiria project that has been doing social innovation with modern board games.

Panel Description

The panel involves both industry and research experts in game design and its usage in the health sector.

Curriculum Vitae

Maria Mesa is a social impact driven entrepreneur, diversity and inclusion advocator and today COO of Alternova, a software company that uses video game engines and data to build interactive experiences that are contributing to make healthcare accessible, democratic and fun.

Curriculum Vitae

Luis Quintero is a PhD student in the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University, Sweden. His research interests are time-series analysis, machine learning, and virtual reality. He is currently exploring how real-time data science can help to create more personalized immersive systems in healthcare, education, and industry.

Curriculum Vitae

Ricardo is an experienced back end developer. CEO and Co-Founder at Alternova, a software development focused in Digital Health where we envision a world in which digital technology positively transforms patients' experience, increases patient engagement with treatment, and boosts accuracy of diagnoses and access to them.

Curriculum Vitae

John is a game designer and interface technologist specialized in the use of physiological signals to optimize the user experience while using interactive systems. John is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo carrying out research in the fields of assistive technology, human-robot interaction, and virtual reality. John has co-designed multiple games that can be used in healthcare scenarios such as exercise promotion in older adults, self-regulation training in children with special needs, and cognitive training in neurorehabilitation therapies. John has created multiple software tools and design frameworks that allows the integration of playful activities and physiological signals in interactive systems such as social robots and virtual simulations.