17th European Conference on Games Based Learning

On Thursday 5 October, Prof. Paul Hollins from Bolton University, UK, presented the GREAT project, specifically "The Application of Games to Engage Citizens in Climate Change Policy Development" (with co-authors Celestine Iwendi and Louise Ashby from the same university) online. One of the purposes was to meet with stakeholders and innovators and raise awareness of the project as well as gain feedback on project progress to date.

The project was well-received by the audience, in particular, concerning the innovative use of games to collect information from citizens and the potential impact that this can bring to transform society. As the project is still in its early stages, we are expected to also attend next year’s conference to share further progress and results of our games implementations. We are delighted to be invited to contribute to the International Journal of Game-Based Learning (IGBL) too!

Besides other interesting presentations, the conference keynote speakers were Prof. Sara de Freitas, whose talk was titled "Gamechangers: Transforming agency, engagement and communities with digital game trails", and Jan Willem Huisman, whose talk was related to "The loss of personal play space, which undermines our society: playing is the foundation for the human scale'.