Imagine a world in which you are valued for who you are—that is, the way your mind works—not how you look, how much money you make, or even how many dragons or enemy hordes you can kill. This is the idea that drove the design of the Noetic, which loosely means “of the mind or intellect.” A person’s attributes, in categories based on Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, are assessed, rewarded, made visible to others, and then evolve with the gameplay. The game is set in a world being built just as ours has run its course. The gameplay requires that players initially succeed in mini-games that define their strengths and begin to reveal their cognitive profiles. These are based on playing drums, driving vehicles, and solving logic puzzles. From there, they are allowed to form teams to escape the decaying city of Genera to build their new world. The game was developed for PCs and Xbox.
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The prototype was unveiled at the Serious Games Summit, part of the Game Developers Conference in Feb 2008. Visual Arts students, Beatrice Tirado, Yann-Pablo Corminboeuf, and Katie Better joined the team to give a visual design to the game.
Researchers and Creators
Project Director: Lee Boot
Game Design: Lee Boot, Shane Lynch, Eric Smallwood, Dan Bailey, Katie Better, Beatriz Tirado, Yann-Pablo Corminboeuf
Technical Director: Eric Smallwood
Programming: Shane Lynch
Students
UMBC Interns: Katie Better, Yann-Pablo Corminboeuf, Dan Reese, James Fox Taggert, Beatriz Tirado, Helen Zhang
This IRC interdisciplinary collaboration was supported in part by funds from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.
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