John Hill talks to some of the people who made their way to the North East for the GameHorizon conference and looks at some of the issues on their minds.

AS A games designer, there’s much more to worry about than just getting the graphics right.

The industry is a multi-billion pound one which is experiencing changes not only in the technology available, but in what people want from their games, how they share them with their friends and how they want to pay for them.

The fourth annual GameHorizon conference at The Sage Gateshead remains a forum in which people can discuss and absorb new ideas and lessons about the industry.

This year’s conference featured a wide range of speakers, from CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson talking about the rise of the EVE Online gaming world to Edelman’s Renate Nyborg discussing the marketing side of things.

The two-day conference featured talks on how the games industry is influencing the world, with BBC Worldwide’s executive VP Robert Nashak showing how the corporation is exploring new platforms for some of its TV favourites.

But there were also insights from leading figures at major gaming operations, such as John Nash from Blitz Games, RedLynx CEO Tero Virtala, Epic Games co-founder Mark Rein and Zynga’s Louis Castle. In a Science and Technology GameHorizon special, we talk to a few of these leading figures, starting with Fun Inc author Tom Chatfield.

It’s fair to say a lot of people love playing Call of Duty and Angry Birds more than going to work.

But what if you took some of the things that make those games addictive and used them to work through your to-do list at the office? That’d be great, right? That’s essentially the story of “gamification”.

The buzzword that’s been rolling around the business world for a little while involves motivating a team to complete business tasks by introducing some of the techniques which have been used in games since Mario was a trainee plumber.

So instead of just ploughing through a long list of things powered by a vague sense of duty and martyrdom, why not award points for completing them, allow people to track their success and progress, and interact and compete with other people doing similar things?

Many within the start-up tech community are already using game mechanics to work through their daily tasks, and research firm Gartner predicted in April that half of companies which manage innovation and research would be using gamification techniques by 2015.

For example, the World Bank Institute has been using a free-to-play social networking game called Evoke to discuss social issues.

In 2010, author and essayist Tom Chatfield wrote a book called Fun Inc, which discussed how video gaming and the pursuit of fun is altering society and how it works.

He appeared at the GameHorizon conference this week to discuss the importance of “toy mechanics” as well as “game mechanics”.