Powerup – A serious game out in the wild

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Powerup the game recently went live created by our colleagues here in IBM using the Torque games engine.
It is a scenario based game, with a multiplayer online team approach to help students understand the role of science in saving a planet.
This fits into the growing usage and acceptance of game based technology and finding ways to engage people in serious subjects but in a more entertaining way.
The game is a downloadable windows client, that then connects to the main servers.
powerup
I captured a little video of some of the elements, the frame rate is much better live of course.

You get to select a first and second name from a list. This is to avoid any risky names I believe. So for once I am not epredator, but I did log on as Ian Hughes, imagine that! Though I did manage to only select the female avatar.
The rest of the communication is via menu systems, not freeform chat, again this is a protection mechanism given the target audience for the game.
Players can join missions, that are typically sharded ones and tasks are designed for more than one person to help complete.
The official website has much more information for parents and teachers. We here at eightbar cannot claim to have built any of this, though we have known about the development as its obviously closely related to our Torque based internal metaverse and is another spin off of bringing IBM into virtual worlds and games in general (which I think we can rightly claim to have set the ball rolling on šŸ™‚ )

73 thoughts on “Powerup – A serious game out in the wild”

  14. Then does everyone who serves ads based on ā€œwirelessā€ internet connection locations have to pay Google? The same thing is being done now when they sniff your IP address and serve adds based on your connection.

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