Category: Blog

This is the highly informal blog of the GAME-department. We use it mostly to document the things we do outside of running one of the worlds strongest game educations. For information about our education, programs and courses, check the official site at Uppsala University.

Posted on - 1 Comment on Grendel Games visits Gotland
 CategoriesBlog, Guest Lectures 

Grendel Games visits Gotland

We met Jan-Jaap when we visited the Netherlands earlier this year. Him and Tim Laning founded Grendel Games at the end of the 90s and have since made a reasonable living from well crafted, expertly designed and validated, serious games.

In December they’ll release their newest title. A consumer-friendly serious game for the Wii with (optional) custom made controllers. How is this a serious game?

The skills required for mastery of this game overlaps entirely with the skills required to perform laparoscopic surgery.

Just to be clear: the game has *nothing* to do with surgery, but surgeons playing this game (with the custom controller) become demonstrably better at performing real world keyhole surgery. Throughout development Grendel Games have been collaborating with hospitals in the Netherlands, to validate the design and effect of the game and hardware. Absotively awesome!


Jan-Jaap has been on Gotland before, serving as a juror at Gotland Game Conference. But it was the first time we got to meet Tim. We’re currently looking in to ways for GAME and Grendel to collaborate further – internships for our students and most likely a few research projects are in the dreampipeline.

Stay stunned!

Posted on - Comments Off on Why did you choose Gotland University?
 CategoriesBlog 

Why did you choose Gotland University?

I just received the report from the First Year Experience-questionnaire we ask all new students to fill in. Saw this in the free-text section and… blasted coffee all over my screen.

This calls for a raise, I’d say. 😀

Other cool data points: every fifth GAME student have studied somewhere else before coming here. Almost 40% find out about our educations through friends. An amazing 70% apply to the GAME education at Gotland University due to our reputation!

Read all the stats here (swedish only, sorry):

First Year Expectations 2012: Speldesign & programmering
First Year Experience 2012: Speldesign & grafik

Posted on - Comments Off on Visbydagen 2012
 CategoriesBlog 

Visbydagen 2012

“The Night of Horror” began a couple of years back when Film på Gotland went out and projected cult horror films in the ruins of Visby one night in October every year.

That beautiful tradition grew into the “The Night of Culture”, with fireshows, song and dancing in the parks and pubs throughout the night.

More and more local businesses and artists were attracted and the thing morphed into Visbydagen. An event that now stretches from early morning to … early morning. 🙂

We’re talking poetry, photo, film, music, dance, art, fire shows, craftsmen opening their studios, exhibitions, tours, markets, foods and on and on and on.

There’s stuff going on throughout the entire city and most of it is free (and brilliant)!

As an extra sweet twist to the deal, we got to celebrate Gotland Pride during the same weekend as Visbydagen this year. If there’s anything we at GAME appreciats its lectures. And human expressions. And rainbows. And love and passion and this beautiful city of ours.

PHOTOS!