STRATFORD, Ont. (Tuesday, 27 August, 2013) – The University of Waterloo Stratford Campus, Canada’s new collaborative campus for digital media technology and commercialization, is attracting international talent to its exclusive Gamification 2013 conference in Stratford, Ontario.
The conference will be the world’s first to truly bridge academic research and business opportunity in the arena of gamification – using game design elements in non-game contexts, in areas such as healthcare, education, financial services, entertainment and retail.
The conference will feature a blend of academic research and experimental applications with industry and not-for-profit examples, commercialization support and best practices.
Recently announced keynote speakers include renowned American author and social game designer Amy Jo Kim, whose design credits include Netflix, Rock Band, eBay, Yahoo! and Ultima Online, as well as Dallas-based designer and consultant Stephen P. Anderson, who wrote the book “Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun and Effective User Experiences.”
“Games are ubiquitous, mutating fast, and becoming embedded in many aspects of everyday life,” said Amy Jo Kim. “The Gamification 2013 conference will allow us to plug entire industries into potentially transformational new opportunities in social gaming and design.”
According to IT research firm Gartner, Inc., more than 50 per cent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes by 2015. By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon.
“Gamification has proven to be a profitable high-growth opportunity with an amazing array of social and business applications,” said Dr. Lennart Nacke, Research Director of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology GAMER Lab and Conference Co-chair. “We have seen so many business conferences about gamification in the past, but we have an entirely unique opportunity here to fuse academic knowledge with industry applications all in the same location.”
The Gamification 2013 conference will be held at the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus on October 2-4, in co-operation with the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
More information about the conference can be found at https://uwaterloo.ca/gamification/
About the University of Waterloo
In just half a century, the University of Waterloo, located at the heart of Canada's technology hub, has become one of Canada's leading comprehensive universities with 35,000 full- and part-time students in undergraduate and graduate programs. Waterloo, as home to the world's largest post-secondary co-operative education program, embraces its connections to the world and encourages enterprising partnerships in learning, research and discovery. In the next decade, the university is committed to building a better future for Canada and the world by championing innovation and collaboration to create solutions relevant to the needs of today and tomorrow. For more information about Waterloo, please visit www.uwaterloo.ca
About University of Ontario Institute of Technology GAMER Lab
The Games and Media Entertainment Research Laboratory (GAMERLab) is at the heart of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology’s graduate game research (http://hcigames.businessandit.uoit.ca). It is a joint research laboratory between UOIT’s gaming faculty. Our researchers are working on projects ranging from gamification, human-computer interaction for games, games user research, fitness and social games, to immersive technology and serious games for health. The mission of the GAMERLab is to create a stimulating creative environment with research impact, where students and faculty can work, teach and learn from one another, collaborate openly, be inspired and have fun in the process.
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