The game is still in development but, like many serious games, it already raises interesting questions about gaming. For instance, the game implicitly argues that a game-format simulation of a possible epidemic will promote awareness, promote strategic thinking about disease transmittal and prevention, and would promote thinking about responses. These are all quality goals; however, as pandemics like Avian Flu leave the news broadcasts and as the game continues in development, I wonder about the efficacy of building a game–given the development timespan–to address these issues.

The timespan I refer to is not the timespan for the game’s relevance–after all, what this game promises could be used to model epidemics or localized outbreaks of particular diseases like STDs–but the timespan for the game to actually be released. The two primary (only?) developers are students, and this is a master’s project for one of them, so how will the project continue once the students move on to new projects? I think quality projects like Outbreak require some sort of built-in support. Perhaps an Open Source or school initiative that archives the old projects for future use, or perhaps the pairing of writing students and developer students so that the writing students can provide documentation on the project so that new developers (students or not) can then build off of past work.

Overall, Outbreak looks like a great project and I’d like to see a working game. I’d also like to see a method in place for building off of past work instead of possibly losing quality work after students move on to new projects.

The new feature stories and news are really useful. One of the stories is about a law professor who teaches game law, and uses games to teach law, and others are more generally on games and education, games and health, and games and advertising. The site has a lot of good content and will hopefully be a useful source in the future. And, more importantly, it shows that serious games are popular enough to warrant focused mass gaming media attention. I’m looking forward to more good things from Serious Games Source.

For informative content, Iser games has just released two versions of a sex education game. One is a sex education trivia game for general use in schools or to help parents open a discussion about sex with their kids and the other is a similar sex education game that’s abstinence-focused.

Black Love Interactive also has informative games, but their games tend to be focused on the erotic side of gaming rather than than being purely informative. Their games include “WTF?! Sex Trivia” and “Rapture Online,” both of which seek to offer sexually stimulating fun.

While both the informative and the sexy approaches are useful for thinking about sex and games, the Sex in Videogame conference also offers a forum for discussions on how games can address sex and sexuality more generally. Since so many games have been developed for all ages, sex often hasn’t been as major of a component as it could be in gaming. Some games have incorporated sex and sexuality into their narratives, and into their general play. But sex is still an awkward and clunky subject for many others (after all, how often do we see games with other than heterosexual player-characters). And, as more sex gets incorporated into games, gaming will need to change media perceptions of gaming such that any adult content doesn’t risk the “Adults Only” label which seems more like the movie industries “NC-17″ than the likely more appropriate “R.” Hopefully the sex and videogames conference will bring up and help improve representations, and perceptions, of sex and sexuality in games.

Plus, good design principles are about limits and allowances. Good design for games should allow players to play in fairly open ways. However, good design often limits user interaction so that users have a clear sense of what they should and shouldn’t do. This makes game play less confusing and less frustrating. Good web design follows the same principles with good design steering users/players toward the right choices while stifling users’ desires to do something less desirable. Bad design often overly restricts actions without providing a motivating factor for its constraints. Code, literature, and poetry have all explored different possibilities for working within constraints, deviating from standards and constraints, and establishing new constraints. Contests like Retro Remakes encourage game designers to do the same and to think about their players as a diverse group of folks with different needs. While the DS (and soon the Wii) offer new playing styles, more games need to offer ways for everyone to play. Retro Remakes is a big step in the right direction, and I can’t wait to see what the winning games are.

Loads of other projects (including earlier versions of Alice) have been around for years, like Logo and Carnegie Mellon has a host of older and newer projects that can be used in teaching and in learning about games. Games that teach and games that inspire learning beg for additional building tools and games that allow others to then build more games and these are just a few of the projects that help create building blocks for educational games.