Christopher Harz
Serious Games: Videogames for Changing the World and Lifelong Learning
Everyone is aware of the growth of entertainment videogames, a global market in excess of $50 billion. Relatively few people outside of the profession are aware of Serious Games, videogames used for non-entertainment purposes, including education and training (for physicians, law enforcement, military, first responders, lawyers, K12 and universities, business teams, musicians, and so on), physical exercise, meditation, communicating with other cultures, designing virtual movie sets and buildings, therapy for serious illness (including PTSD), and a host of other applications.
Serious Games can stimulate your creative processes, help your organization collaborate with remote teams, or enable learning topics such as science and math more effectively than by traditional textbooks. The field is growing rapidly, and offers many job opportunities for both young and old for a range of talents, including teaching, art, programming, design, game technology, animation, audio, and—especially—the field needs “agents,” advanced thinkers who can bridge different organizations and help bring them together as meta-communities.
Dr. Christopher R. Harz is a marketing and production executive for Information Technology systems. He is VP of VirtualAgility, a leading producer of collaboration and coordination environments for the military and homeland security. Dr. Harz helped design and produce the first massively multiplayer online game worlds, including the $240 million 3-D animation virtual world, Simnet, for DARPA. He has produced both Serious Games (for training US and NATO forces) and entertainment games. He worked as systems analyst on command and control, brilliant munitions, UAVs, combat robots and war gaming at the RAND Corporation, the military think tank. He holds MBA and Ed.D. (in educational technology) degrees from Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. Dr. Harz has been a frequent writer and presenter on virtual environments, Serious Games, the New Internet (IPv6), advanced weapons, and communications technology, and is a member of Siggraph, Mensa, and SPJ.
