The University of South Carolina’s Center for Digital Humanities is creating and hosting a summer Humanities Gaming Institute with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities’s Office of Digital Humanities (do their business cards have fold out panels?).

The purpose of this 3 week long institute (and the follow-on year of discussions and collaboration) is to explore the interplay of serious games and advanced technology towards furthering both electronic gaming and the study of the humanities.

With the generous help of luminary experts and emerging innovators in game studies and development, our team seeks participants to:

Investigate the cognitive components of games that inform and enable successful gameplay, including immersive structure, rule governance, interactivity, and simulation.

Provide hands-on research into existing serious games from a variety of fields, including history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, and economics.

Produce, under the guidance of experienced game developers, games that can scale to meet participants’ research and teaching needs in the humanities.

(via The Future Now Blog)