All times are listed in Central Standard Time (CST)
FRIDAY APRIL 15 SCHEDULE
| SESSION TITLES | SESSION PRESENTERS | |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 AM | CSGC – Opening Remarks & Welcome Message | TU President Brad Carson |
| 11:00 AM | Virtual Reality Simulation in Nursing Education | Cassandra Barrow |
| 12:00 PM | Transmedia Environmental Narrative | Kevin Taylor |
| 1:00 PM | Intro to Game Maker Studio 2 | Elliott Ridgway |
| 2:00 PM | Level Design: An Exercise in Mind-Control | Brandon Reed |
| 3:00 PM | Blitz League | Daniel Jackson |
| 4:00 PM | Putting your game on Steam | Daniel Jackson & Elliott Ridgway |
Session Descriptions
Welcome Remarks from President Carson
[Friday, April 15- 10:00 am]
Brad Carson is The University of Tulsa’s 21st president. Having built a distinguished career in public service, law and education, before becoming president of TU, Carson was a professor at the University of Virginia, teaching courses related to national security and public sector innovation.
President Carson will be giving the welcoming remarks for the 11th annual Computer Simulation and Gaming Conference.
Virtual Reality Simulation in Nursing Education
[Friday, April 15- 11:00 am]
Virtual reality simulation provides opportunities for nursing students to gain practice in various clinical environments with different patients. Students are all experiencing the same situation and can repeat scenarios indefinitely. Several companies are emerging in this field – what are the pros and cons of each?
Simulation in nursing education replicates the clinical environment and provides feedback to students for performance improvement. Nursing students are able to practice skills, gain muscle memory, and make errors safely before caring for patients. Demand is increasing as there are fewer opportunities for clinical experiences and more concerns for patient safety. Nursing students have requested more simulation, and it decreases their anxiety in the clinical setting while increasing their knowledge, skills, critical thinking, self-confidence, and collaboration. How should virtual reality simulation be implemented throughout the nursing education curriculum according to current research?
Research specific to newly emerging virtual reality simulation is scarce and could be critical to further the development of high-fidelity simulations in nursing education. What are recommendations for future research? How can different departments collaborate to increase the availability of virtual reality simulation to nursing students?
Transmedia Environmental Narrative
[Friday, April 15 – 12:00 pm]
A discussion of the required concepts to successfully create an immersive narrative environmental experience, and the future tools set to impact the field.
Intro to Game Maker Studio 2
[Friday 15- 1:00 pm]
This presentation will introduce you to Game Maker Studio 2, an integrated development environment and game engine tailored for quickly developing 2D games. I will discuss the pros and cons of using Game Maker Studio 2, and we’ll walk through a couple of step-by-step tutorials that show you how to make simple games in Game Maker Studio 2. Some basic familiarity with programming languages is encouraged but not required.
Level Design: An Exercise in Mind-Control
[Friday, April 15 – 2:00 pm]
Guiding the eye of a viewer/player using different psychological and visual sleight-of-hand tricks to make them do exactly what they’re supposed to do. The talk will go over several tricks that can be used, such as how the position, color, and orientations of objects can affect which direction the player chooses to go, effective ways to control a space, and ranking each of these concepts based on how successful they are.
Blitz League
[Friday, April 15 – 3:00 pm]
Game Designer Daniel Jackson will give a presentation of the game Blitz League and the audience give feedback.
Putting your game on Steam
[Friday, April 15 – 4:00 pm]
Are you ready to start selling your game on STEAM? This in-depth talk covers the ins and outs of putting your game up for sale on Steam. What you should know and what we wish had before you get started!
Worlds Built For Us, By Us
[Saturday, April 16 – 11:00 am]
Urban Coders Guild began offering Unity game development in 2021 as a learning track for middle and high school students. In this session, we’ll discuss the importance of cultivating historically underserved and underrepresented voices in game development and storytelling.
Creative Computer Literacy Education
[Saturday, April 16 – 12:00 pm]
This session covers educational methods for establishing a baseline of computer literacy for students in creative fields regardless of prior technical knowledge. We’ll go over strategies for student engagement, scaffolding complex information in an approachable way, and building technical confidence in the classroom.
Better Concept Art and Storytelling: How to Spark Creativity by Direct Observation
[Saturday, April 16 – 1:00 pm]
The best artwork starts from a foundation of real-world experiences. This workshop will provide a variety of natural artifacts that will serve as a starting point for the participants’ artistic explorations. Rhaelene Lowther and Anna Zusman recently completed a collaborative art project, Quotidian Moments through Different Lenses, where they created different interpretations of shared visual experiences. Their walks in rural Arkansas was the source for these experiences, during which they took photos, video, and occasionally audio recordings of their observations. These became part of their inspiration and preparatory process for the final works, which took a variety of forms, including watercolor, acrylic paintings, digital drawings, and 3D models. In this workshop, Rhaelene and Anna model this process by showing examples of their work and the images of the experiences that sparked it. They guide participants through various tools, technologies, and thought processes to help them develop concept art and design, including character and environment design and world-building. Participants will leave with sketches, photographs, or written drafts of ideas for characters, environments or stories inspired by observation.
Live from the Exhibit Hall
[Saturday, April 16 – 2:00 pm]
The Computer Simulation and Gaming Conference (CSGC) will feature a variety of exhibitors as well as public showings and demos for many of the competition entries. This session will be a highlight of the exhibitor hall and all the fun activities that in-person attendees can expect to participate in.
The Poetics of Video Games & How Creative Writing can help your gaming design
[Saturday, April 16 – 3:00 pm]
Professor Jenkins will talk about his the Poetics of Video Games, and will also consider how this and other courses in Creative Writing can help improve your video game design.
Helping Cancer Patients Reduce Psychological Distress with Embodied Conceptual Metaphors in a Serious VR Game
[Saturday, April 16 – 4:00 pm]
38.4% of people in the U.S. will receive a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. Those facing cancer are likely to experience cancer-related psychological distress. A warped sense of self and one’s circumstances is common as well as depression, anxiety, fear, and feeling discouraged. Depressed survivors are twice as likely to die prematurely. Suicide is twice as likely for cancer survivors. Additionally, cancer patients with high levels of distress have a 32% greater chance of dying. Mental activity affects behavior, and behavior can negatively influence physiological and molecular processes like cellular apoptosis, the cell’s rate of mutation, immunity, and growth speed.
Cancer is, at least in part, beyond the understanding of even our greatest minds and buried in the essential elements of our biology and as a result, must be undertaken with a broad range of experts beyond traditional medicine. Consequently, it should not be surprising that patients struggle to understand their future with this disease. Cancer is an unknown entity. Fearing the unknown future is a source of distress for cancer patients.
Metaphors help patients make sense of their past, present, and future experiences with cancer. The embodiment of a metaphor refers to the idea that cognition and communication form by physical experience and bodily interaction with a tangible world, as well as giving shape to thoughts and feelings.
VR can visualize metaphors or provide alternative ones that help distance patients from cancer and regain control over it. Games are inherently metaphorical because the user plays as a character and gains said character’s abilities. In addition to the metaphorical benefits of VR, the medium also helps reduce psychological distress.
This investigation mapped cancer patients’ distress, comfort, and metaphors, and connected them with VR game concepts and interactions. Additionally, this investigation explores the metaphorical presentation of cancer in a VR space.