Serious Games Summit 2005 Notes

I've posted my notes from the Serious Games Summit over on my site. If anybody else attended and took notes they'd like a link to, please make a note in the comments, and I'll add it here.

[HazMat Hotzone] was one of the most interesting sessions in the Summit. Not only had Jesse Schell of CMU brought in a half-dozen machines on which to demonstrate their software, he also prevailed upon the New York Fire Department to provide personnel to work through a simulation of a chlorine gas leak in a city subway. Each firefighter had his own PC and headset to simulate the visual and auditory experience of going into a crisis situation and was required to use "radio" to communicate with each other, the truck driver, and the dispatcher. Once on the scene, they donned their repiratory gear (which restricted their field of view and had an "air remaining" meter as part of the heads-up display) and headed down into the subway station, asking bystanders for details of what was going on, helping ambulant victims to an exit, and preparing to carry out people who were more seriously afflicted. We were able to watch things unfold on two screens, one of which showed the view of the officer who was leading the 3 man team into the station, the other showing the screen of the scenario administrator, who could float trough the environment, observing the action from any vantage point, and filling a sort of "dungeon master" role, where she could modify the training scenario on the fly.

After the session was concluded, the instructor debriefed the team, pointing out what they did well, and bringing out places they could have done better. (Though the rumbling of subway cars in the background indicated that trains were still running, the team didn't contact the transit department to keep the subway cars from pushing the contamination through the tunnels to other stations.) The Chief of the New York Fire Academy discussed the changing training needs of the department in the wake of 9/11, and how training for biological/ radiological/chemical hazards had become a more critical part of their regimen. Interestingly, both the firefighters and the programmers cited the realistic graphics as being one of the key success factors for the simulation -- the firefighters became markedly more engaged once the in-game uniforms were modified to match their real world gear, randomly blowing trash was added to the streets, and other realistic touches were added.

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The last session was hosted by Curtis Conkey, Lead engineer at NETC Experimentation Lab, in Orlando, FL. He has been exploring the challenges of integrating 3D simulation games with Learning Management Systems, which track what courses people have taken and how they did. The first difficulty is that the NAVY requires all of their instructional material to be compliant with SCORM, a standardized way of packaging reusable, web-based instructional modules. Unfortunately, since SCORM is web-based, 3D games don't fit well into it, as they aren't typically delivered through a web page, often require extensive setup, and have their own user interfaces. The second challenge is extracting meaningful data from a play session in a 3D game: while it might be easy to gather success statistics is a straightforward single-player snowboarding game, it's very difficult to extract good data from a multiplayer virtual world. (He showed the infamous Leeroy Jenkins video as an example of this -- how does one have an LMS system automatically determine whether this was a failure of leadership, motor skills, planning, or execution?) Though he didn't have any definitive answers to these challenges, I suspect that this will be an area we at Texas State will need to explore over time as well.

More Universities Teaching Game Development & Design

Seth Schiesel writes for the New York Times on the increasing number of Universities that are recognizing study and design of Computer Games as a legitimate academic concern. From the article (free registration required):

Three decades after bursting into pool halls and living rooms, video games are taking a place in academia. A handful of relatively obscure vocational schools have long taught basic game programming. But in the last few years a small but growing cadre of well-known universities, from the University of Southern California to the University of Central Florida, have started formal programs in game design and the academic study of video games as a slice of contemporary culture.

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Certainly, the burgeoning game industry is famished for new talent. And now, universities are stocked with both students and young faculty members who grew up with joystick in hand. And some educators say that studying games will soon seem no less fanciful than going to film school or examining the cultural impact of television.

According to the International Game Developers Association, fewer than a dozen North American universities offered game-related programs five years ago. Now, that figure is more than 100, with dozens more overseas. At Carnegie Mellon University, a drama professor and a computer science professor have created an entertainment technology program that now enrolls 90 students and will soon open branches in Australia and South Korea.

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"There are definitely some people in the game industry who wonder why academia is taking an interest in them after all this time," Ms. Fullerton said. "It reminds me that there was a moment when film studies really took off and the guys at the studios were like, 'Who are these Spielbergs and Lucases and Coppolas coming out of these film schools with these crazy ideas?' They'll come around."

As an expatriate of the commercial game industry, I don't really think that the game industry is "famished for talent", as EA might want us to believe. However, the fact that the industry is being taken increasingly seriously as a trainable academic discipline bodes well for its future; it's gradually moving from fringe to mainstream.

What Would a State of the Art Instructional Video Game Look Like?

J.P. Gee has an interesting article (free registration required) in a recent issue of Innovate.

Unfortunately, our schools are still locked in endless and pointless battles between "traditionalism" and "progressivism," between lecture-style teaching and immersion learning, as if these were the only two alternatives. In contrast, given that good commercial games have been so successful in attracting and maintaining learners, it is clear that they appear to have solved this central paradox of learning. This is in large part because good commercial games are based on good theories of learning.

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As one masters Full Spectrum Warrior through activity supported by distributed knowledge (i.e., the knowledge built into the virtual soldiers), many aspects of military professionalism come to life. All sorts of arcane words and information that would be hard to retain through rote drill become part of one's arsenal, tools through which activity is accomplished and experience understood. For example, I now know what "bounding" means in military practice, how it is connected to military values, and what role it plays tactically in achieving military goals. A mere dictionary definition could not begin to compete with mine.