About Games and Interaction Design research group works on innovation in the design of games and playful interaction.
Expertise center for Games & Game design (EGG)
The Expertise center supports the game industry in gaining knowledge on applied game design.
Contact
Research coordinators:
Ina van der Brug, ina.vanderbrug@kmt.hku.nl
Evelyn Grooten, evelyn.grooten@kmt.hku.nl
HKU, University of the Arts Utrecht
P.O.box 2471
1200 CL Hilversum
The Netherlands
T: +31 35 6836464
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By Evelyn Grooten, on April 23rd, 2013
Het onderstaande bericht is gisteren verschenen op CAO-net van de Belastingdienst en is geschreven door Jos Sauren.
 Wat startte met een tweedaags Development Camp, mondde donderdag 18 april uit in een beoordeling van een jury van de Hogeschool voor Kunsten Utrecht (HKU). De game Olga werd getest door docenten van de HKU. They were bloody impressed!
Jakob Boeve, Jan van Nimwegen en Jos Sauren gingen donderdag met ‘hun’ serious game Olga naar de HKU. Docenten daar wilden ervaren wat Olga als game voorstelde. De handen jeukten van de aanwezige docenten. Ze speelden de game en tijdens het spelen slaakten ze kreten als: “Ik wil nog een keer spelen! Kan dat?”, “I am bloody impressed” en “Dit had ik niet verwacht, dat jullie al zover zouden zijn!”.
 Mooie woorden over de game. Ook prachtige woorden over het leereffect waarover Jan en Jakob vertelden aan de HKU: Javaprincipes zijn duidelijker geworden. Ook heb ik meer zelfvertrouwen gekregen en ik durf nu meer zelf te doen. Een tip was er ook van de docenten: “Geef geen tekstuele uitleg over de game. Een game ervaar je, dus ook hoe je een game speelt!” Er is dus nog werk te doen. Aandacht heeft nu de tweede game ‘Sticky’. Die heeft als thema veilig omgaan met data en hoe je als speler data op je USB-stick zet.
Meer informatie over dit project is te lezen op de projectpagina Java
By Irene van Peer, on April 8th, 2013
A Game for Happiness
The Road To Happiness is an awareness campaign and computer game developed for Plan Nederland by the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU). It was launched by MTV on March 8th 2013.
A multidisciplinary team of ten HKU students from the schools of Games & Interaction, Media, and Art & Economics, were challenged to create a campaign from the perspective of two different cultures, in order to immerse Dutch youth with a lower educational level in the difficult circumstances faced by young Ghanaian women looking for work.
Listening to the experiences, wishes and ideas of the young women provided valuable insight to the students. Tumu, Northern Ghana.
Several weeks of ethnographic research, interviews and small workshops on location resulted in four thoughtful video portraits of women travelling from the north of Ghana to the southern city of Accra to pursue their dream of finding happiness and prosperity.
To illustrate the difficult situation of the young women, working hard for little money, the students also designed and developed an online multiplayer game, to be played by both girls and boys. The game lets the player experience the struggle of earning a living by selling products on a competitive market place during the day, and the challenge of finding a safe place to survive during the night.
The universal wish for happiness connects the two cultures and acts as a starting point for awareness.
HKU students tested their design with young students at Via Nova College, Utrecht.
The Road to Happiness is part of WeCreate, a four-year program of Plan Nederland, where young designers who currently study at the HKU, design for the challenges of gender inequality.
This year the campaign focused on Ghana. In the coming two years HKU and Plan will continue collaborating together on WeCreate in Indonesia. This is a great challenge and opportunity for HKU students and the research groups Creative Design for Development and Games and Interaction Design Research to co-create with a variety of cultures.
By Marinka Copier, on March 11th, 2013
The Playing with Pigs project is featured in Liat Clark’s Wired article “A pig of a problem: designing human-animal interspecies games”.
Playing with pigs or orangutans via an iPad might sound like a novelty, but could this kind of digitally mediated interspecies communication change our view of the animal kingdom, and our treatment of it?
By Evelyn Grooten, on February 25th, 2013
 We like to look at the world through our game-glasses. Usually, we see lots of opportunities to make situations more playful, but some situations are locked tighter than we like to see. Sometimes we see situations that are designed and are plain broken. Very often, this is the case with situations that have been designed by people who have no game or interaction design knowledge.
Some examples of these broken designs are the laws in our country. And rules for paying taxes. This can’t be changed, you say? Well, we are trying anyway!
We have started a cooperation with the Dutch Tax Administration a while ago, when we did Code 4. Now, we continue with the people who program the forms we fill out every year to get our tax returns, or to find out how much we owe the state. What if we can give them a playful mindset? Would that influence our experiences as tax payers in any way? Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But here’s what we are doing:
Jos Sauren, innovation ambassador at the Dutch Tax Administration, came to our research program with the following dilemma. On the one hand, the Dutch Tax Administration has a shortage of Java programmers. They hire freelancers to solve this. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who work with procedural programming languages, which are not used anymore. Jos believes in the power of serious gaming, and decided to ask us to design a game where these programmers can be retrained to become Java professionals.
The biggest difference between the procedural codes and Java is the Object Oriented Programming. The programmers that are being retrained, go through a couple of weeks of crash courses, and then they become interns on projects within the Dutch Tax Administration.
We have snatched those interns. Beginning of February, we put them in a 2-day Game Dev Camp. In this camp, they designed and built 3 prototypes of games, based on the Java language. After the camp, 4 of them continued on one of the games. Last monday, the group presented their progress: the game called Olga is almost finished!
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