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.