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- Games Get Serious
- If you think video games are child's
play, meet the growing community of scientists, policy makers, and
game developers who beg to differ
- July / August, 2006
- By Josh Schollmeyer
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- "When the Federation of American
Scientists [FAS] assembled a road map for developing educational
technology in 2001, we brought in the top learning scientists and
asked, 'How do people learn best?' In a nutshell, the answer was
individualized instruction, encouraging questions, and immediate
feedback. We then queried the deans of the leading computer science
departments across the country about what types of emerging
information technology could implement these recommendations. One of
the responses--video and computer games--surprised us. But games are
getting remarkably sophisticated. The simulations and graphics are
incredible; they feature a lot of artificial intelligence; and you
can attack them from many different angles. In short, they do all of
the things that the learning scientists told us worked well." --
Kay
Howell, FAS vice president for information technologies projects.
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- Few dare call them games. Not yet,
at least. And certainly not in front of those who fund games-related
projects. A euphemism like "decision-based simulation" maybe, but
rarely a "game." To many, video and computer games represent an
adolescent diversion, a parental annoyance that thwarts homework,
chores, and all things productive. So when FAS and others stump for
games as an educational or training tool, they begin by stating the
problem: "You oversee a very complex system," or "You want to reach
a new audience." The notion of a game providing the solution comes
later. Such is the way when establishing a new medium.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars christened them
"serious games" four years ago, mobilizing a loose-knit collection
of game developers, educational foundations, grassroots
organizations, human rights advocates, medical professionals, first
responders, homeland security consultants, and assorted others
around a common cause. Together--the experts provide the facts, the
game developers the technological know-how--they've created a
nascent industry. Their goal: To convince nonbelievers that games
teach just as well as books, film, or any other medium.
"Games let us create representations of how things work in a medium
that's built to do exactly that," says Ian Bogost, an assistant
professor of digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology
and the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame
Criticism. "If you want to explain how a nuclear power plant works
in a textbook, you have to demonstrate it with a logical written
argument. But with games, the player can literally interact with the
model of how a system works."
The serious games moniker provides a catchall for simulations that
transcend traditional video and computer game fodder (gunplay, slick
cars, and sports) and delve into heftier issues (responding to
genocide, promoting democracy, and training first responders).
Already neatly segmented, serious games exist for science, defense,
health, conflict resolution, and social change. Their
sophistication, target audience, and message vary. FAS developed
Immune Attack to allow high school students to experience the
challenge of defending the human body against invading antigens;
PeaceMaker, a game created by students at Carnegie Mellon
University, lets Palestinians and Israelis switch roles to better
understand each other's plight; and the U.N. World Food Programme's
Food Force teaches kids about the difficulties of delivering aid to
the developing world.
An industry once solely for twentysomething males by twentysomething
males is morphing into something much more relevant. "The serious
games field has made a lot of progress," says James Gee, a professor
of learning sciences at the University of Wisconsin and author of
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. "The
ideas are beginning to gel, and funding is starting to come in. It's
quite on schedule by any historical antecedent. And yet, it has a
lot of challenges."
"In the mid-1990s, I worked at the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy on a number of topics, including climate change.
At one point, I was given a fairly simple simulation created by the
Dutch government that ran on PCs--the Dutch actually played the
simulation in their parliament. I would play this model while eating
lunch. Because of its interactivity, I discovered more about climate
change in a few hours than I ever learned from any briefing or
supercomputer output." --David Rejeski, director of the Wilson
Center's Serious Games Initiative
They gather for Serious Games Summits twice a year. In the spring,
during the first two days of the week-long Game Developers
Conference--GDC to all but the unhip--and again in the fall for a
stand-alone event, just outside of Washington, D.C. The GDC attracts
thousands of gamers who make the pilgrimage each year from Europe,
Asia, and all points in between to ensure that not one gaming
development leaves them behind.
This year, 12,500 predominantly T-shirt clad gamers converged in
March upon sleepy San Jose for GDC:06. For a few hundred of these
convention visitors, the Serious Games Summit in the adjoining
Marriott's second-floor ballroom salons proves curious. Opportunity
lurks in these three rooms. Exactly what kind of opportunity, not
even those well steeped in serious games quite know. "Like all new
things," Gee says, "what we don't know is much bigger than what we
do know."
Every now and again, Ben Sawyer, co-director of the Serious Games
Initiative, pokes his head into a first-day, early morning
"Birds-of-a-Feather Meet-Up," gauging the room's tenor. In many
ways, it's Sawyer's passion and nurturing that fuels the summit's
prevailing sense of opportunity. His zeal for serious games has gone
viral. About 45 people attended the first serious games gathering in
February 2003 at the Wilson Center. In San Jose, by Sawyer's count,
as many as 500 people will stroll through the Marriott ballrooms.
"Ben is the social networking hub," Gee says. "Sooner or later, he's
the person that everyone will go through."
Says FAS's Howell, "Ben taught me to look in the mirror every
morning and say, 'I'm not a gamer. If I'm going to build a game, I
need to find a person who knows how to build games and not pretend
that I know how to do it.'"
Sawyer certainly didn't invent serious games. In the early
nineteenth century, the Prussian military pioneered the use of
scaled miniatures for war-gaming. Chris Crawford's Balance of
Power--a computer game simulating Cold War brinkmanship that
challenged players to avoid initiating a nuclear war--achieved some
commercial success in the 1980s. And in the 1990s, the U.S. military
developed tactical training simulations that it later marketed as
highly successful video games with titles such as America's Army and
Close Combat: First to Fight. But it was Sawyer, along with Rejeski,
who formulated serious gaming into a viable, recognizable niche.
"What we did was brand something that was happening, get everybody
talking about it in the same way, and draw some attention to it,"
Sawyer says.
First, they crafted a manifesto of sorts, a 2002 white paper
entitled "Serious Games: Improving Public Policy Through Game-Based
Learning and Simulation," which Rejeski commissioned and Sawyer
wrote. Drawing upon his experiences working on Virtual U, a game the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation released in 2000 to train higher
education administrators, Sawyer outlined why stodgy simulations and
models could use a makeover. "Any casual observer who has seen
someone interact with a computer or video game can easily understand
how games can quickly captivate their audience," he wrote.
Sawyer wanted those in the policy community to understand that games
harness people's inherent competitive instincts, presenting players
with multiple outcomes and compelling them to discover and develop
strategies to succeed. "Gaming is by no means a replacement to
existing model and simulation building processes and practices, but
it has tangible advantages that ultimately could result in wider,
more flexible, and more versatile products. To ignore these
contributions wholesale will directly affect the ability for any
simulation or model to reach its full potential."
Next, Sawyer and Rejeski went about building a community. With money
from the Sloan Foundation, they held a small gathering--comprised of
a multifarious mix of archetypal bureaucrats and gamers--in
Washington. From there, they assembled a website and listserv. They
quickly found that a disconnected community already existed, which
included Gee and some colleagues at the University of Wisconsin and
Howell and FAS President Henry Kelly. "People came out of the
woodwork," Rejeski says. "The idea that you could do something else
with this medium had occurred to them, but they figured they were
the only ones thinking like this."
Far from it. Hence, as the serious games gospel spread, the
discipline rapidly multiplied. All of which helps explain the
presence of the couple hundred onlookers from the commercial gaming
industry during the two-day slate of roundtables, lectures, and
meet-ups in San Jose. After almost four years, they'd heard enough;
now they wanted to determine for themselves how they might fit into
the burgeoning industry taking form in these hotel ballroom salons.
"They sense they shouldn't take their eyes off of it," Sawyer says.
"They don't want to wake up in five years and go, 'We just let $20
million slip through the cracks!'"
"On my last trip to Ukraine, I showed the game
version of A Force More Powerful to some activists who'd been very
active in the Orange Revolution. One of the guys couldn't believe
it. He said, 'We really need this!'
"Since the Orange Revolution, Kiev has become a collecting point for
Georgians, Belarusians, Azerbaijanis, Kyrgyz, and Uzbeks trying to
learn about nonviolent strategy for their own purposes. To help
train the leadership circles of these various movements, my
Ukrainian friend has been using the game, which is tremendously
gratifying." --Steve York, documentary filmmaker and newly minted
game producer
Welcome to Grbac, Slovopaknia, a fictional city in a fictional
nation in a fictional world that exists only in A Force More
Powerful: The Game of Nonviolent Strategy. In this (not so) mythical
place, a classic strongman, the menacingly named Mayor Gavrilovic,
rules with typical strongman aplomb, cultivating corruption and
squelching dissent. Such is the backdrop for "Corruption is
Stealing," one of ten historically inspired game scenarios in
A
Force More Powerful, as Gavrilovic imprisons a local university
student for ridiculing him in the school newspaper.
The mission, per the game's instructions: Lead a "stunned and
disorganized student movement" to spring the incarcerated student
from jail, build an anticorruption coalition to force Gavrilovic's
resignation, and triumph in the citywide mayoral race held
thereafter; all the while, achieving these objectives without the
use of force--employing nonviolent tactics such as fundraising,
hunger strikes, and fraternizing with neutral/sympathetic parties.
The game derives from a three-hour PBS documentary series by the
same name--directed and produced by York--that chronicled how
nonviolence works as a fulcrum for democratic change. After it aired
in 2000, York and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC),
a nonprofit organization founded by an executive producer and
adviser of the series, began receiving correspondence from people
all over the world describing how they incorporated the series into
their own nonviolence training. Wanting to provide them with a
proper training tool, ICNC decided to transform the film's themes
into a computer game.
Last February, after four years of development, York's production
company, ICNC, and BreakAway Games, a top serious game developer
based in Maryland, jointly released the game-version of A Force More
Powerful, complete with a 116-page instruction manual. The game was
produced with the close consultation of Ivan Marovic, a leader--and
serendipitously, a longtime gamer--in the student resistance
movement that helped topple Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
"If we were going to do something that would be useful to movements,
activists, and strategists, it had to be done responsibly," York
says. "It wasn't going to be simplistic or dumbed-down; it was going
to have a steep learning curve."
The best serious games always do. Even if the gameplay is simple and
intuitive, the strategies require thoughtful choices that often
yield difficult consequences. In A Force More Powerful, pursuing too
brazen tactics too quickly, no matter how peaceful, can lead to the
death or imprisonment of opposition members. The game then ends,
with the push for democratic change suppressed. Extra lives don't
exist in serious games.
Likewise, in Pax Warrior, a blend of documentary film and game that
places high school and college students in the role of the head U.N.
peacekeeper during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, "winning" is relative.
No player stops the genocide. Hamstrung by the same historical
constraints that faced Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, the actual commander
of the U.N. peacekeeping mission to Rwanda at the time, the students
try to save as many lives as possible given the circumstances. "Pax
teaches you how good intentions are not enough," says Andreas
Ua'Siaghail, the game's co-creator. "It tests an individual's valor
in a historical context."
That's partly the value of serious games--to allow users to fail
again and again without real-world repercussions--what Rejeski calls
"failing softly." It's why the U.S. military understands the utility
of games so intuitively. The military reasons that if soldiers lose
fake lives in simulations, it better hones their ability to survive
on the real battlefield. Similar thinking is now taking hold in
firehouses, police stations, and hospitals--the frontlines in the
event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack.
Firefighters are particularly well-suited for game-based training,
according to Jesse Schell, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon
University's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). Their age
generally skews young; they train aggressively, meaning they're
open-minded to new training techniques that could save their lives;
and they possess the time to train. "Nurses make rounds and cops
walk the beat, but firefighters hang around the firehouse waiting
for something to happen," says Schell, the former creative director
of the Disney Virtual Reality Studio and the CEO of his own
independent game studio in Pittsburgh.
For nearly four years, Schell, along with other ETC faculty and
students, has worked closely with both the Pittsburgh and New York
City fire departments to craft a multiplayer game called Hazmat:
Hotzone. "Firefighters train for fires," Schell says. "They don't
necessarily prepare for colorless, odorless toxins. And when they
were training for it, it was in the classroom and the data wasn't
sticking."
Hazmat: Hotzone puts them on the scene, forcing quick decisions and
testing their assumptions in a safe, virtual environment. One
firefighter plays the role of incident commander, while the others
"responding" to the scene individually log into clustered computer
stations, communicating with each other via radio. Then an
instructor, who sets the particular hazmat scenario, alters the
variables at will. An initial gaming test the ETC crew tried out on
actual firefighters featured a sarin attack in a shopping mall.
Almost immediately, a cyber firefighter collapsed.
"I thought if I could see, it was safe to go in," the firefighter
controlling the character told his instructor.
"Not when you have suspicion of a hazmat," the instructor responded.
"In that case, you should be looking for other tips--like all the
unconscious people on the scene."
"It became clear to us that the real value we could give
firefighters was an opportunity to try lots of different scenarios
with lots of different parameters over and over again," Schell says.
"That trains them to go through the right thought process."
"The government is spending money like water and has this problem of
training first responders. So we thought, 'For a couple million
dollars, we can develop Hazmat: Hotzone for every firehouse in the
country free of charge. I bet we can make that happen.' No such
luck. After going to Homeland Security for the fourth time, someone
at Homeland finally said, 'You're going about this all wrong. The
government does not fund universities for the production and
distribution of software; the government funds research and
experiments. We will give grants to people who want to buy your
product. But that means you have to secure your own funding to get
the thing built.'" --Jesse Schell
Unlike Hazmat: Hotzone, not every serious game
costs millions of dollars to produce. But their niche-specific
nature considerably limits the consumer pool, as the audience for
some games might number only in the hundreds. Although Sawyer
believes a larger commercial market for serious games will develop,
the early returns suggest that their crossover appeal remains
limited. To wit, A Force More Powerful will ship 4,000 copies in its
first six months of release. A point of comparison: Halo 2, one of
the most popular commercial games, sold 2.4 million copies within
the first 24 hours it hit retail shelves in 2004. "We're still a
rounding error," Sawyer admitted in San Jose.
So Schell and others trudge to Washington, only to find Capitol Hill
hesitant. Congress has heard pledges of revolutionary educational
and training software before: "Every student will have an electronic
tutor!" went the refrain not so long ago. But often, the
proselytizers of such revamped learning never delivered on their
promises. "Why should we believe you now?" governmental staffers
quizzed FAS President Kelly when he originally approached them,
circa 2000, about investing more federal funding into educational
games. His answer: "The problem turned out to be harder than
expected, but the technology has matured to the point where there's
a lot of opportunity for progress."
The shift to more adult subject matter in some high-profile
commercial game titles hasn't helped either. The Grand Theft Auto
series, which sparked outcry among elected officials owing to the
games' heavy dose of sex and violence, has emerged as the public
face of the gaming industry. Such political rhetoric reminded
Rejeski of comparable debates that occurred during television's
adolescence. So he furthered the parallel himself. Using the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting as the paradigm, in April he
posted an article on Gamasutra.com, a website for video game
developers, calling for the establishment of a Corporation for
Public Gaming. "Noncommercial television floundered, despite
millions of dollars of investment by the Ford Foundation, until the
government stepped in and created a viable and long-lasting
alternative," he wrote. "With similar vision and foresight, and a
relatively small amount of funding, this could happen with video and
computer games."
Rejeski's proposal: A $15 million annual investment for three years
that's dispersed to games that "inform, enlighten, and enrich the
public." After the third year, the program would be reviewed and
"continued, modified, or terminated" as seen fit. Most importantly,
it would specifically allocate funding to study whether serious
games are living up to their expectations--quantifiable proof that
should help loosen congressional purse strings. "We just haven't
done those kinds of studies," says Howell, who helped FAS push for
legislation, introduced in both the House and Senate, that would
also spur more federal dollars for serious games.
The idea hit. "I'd say 95 percent of the response was somewhere
between positive and euphoric," Rejeski says. It burned through the
blogosphere and received coverage from National Public Radio and BBC
Radio. Better still, the notion of a Corporation for Public Gaming
soothed the psyche of a serious games community that Rejeski sensed
was growing disenchanted. "It was a reminder of the promise and the
possibilities that are still unrealized," he says. "The serious
games community has become too tactical and introspective. The spark
and vision from two or three years ago is missing. But the
opportunity is still there, and now is the time to do it."
At the Serious Games Summit, Sawyer saves the introspection for the
second day of the conference. On the first day, the spark still
seems apparent. The game developers and various experts in
attendance quibble a bit--the experts don't understand games, the
developers don't respect the facts. But it's a creative rivalry that
makes for better, livelier games. Most of the day's sessions brim
with attentive audiences, forcing many in the overflow crowd to sit
on the floor.
But like Rejeski, Sawyer is attuned to the
throng he helped assemble. He too knows the money question lingers
and hears the criticism from those in and out of the serious games
community that hype dominates the proceedings. Most of all, however,
the breakthrough hit doesn't exist yet. And until it does, "you
won't have a lot of consensus," says Gee, who classifies early
standard-bearers such as A Force More Powerful as better than most
serious games, but still not of commercial quality.
Shortly before lunch on the second day, Sawyer confronts all such
concerns, conducting an hour-long panel with Gee and Kelly--entitled
"What's Wrong with Serious Games?"--that deconstructs the ills of
the serious games space.
"We've been given a Maserati before we've been given a driver's
license," Kelly opens.
"We have to evaluate the learning systems that games generate," Gee
continues.
"Are we just apologists for Grand Theft Auto?" reads one Sawyer
slide.
With the purging complete, Sawyer returns to the stump, convinced as
ever that such squabbles merely indicate the discipline's growth and
maturity and that games represent the future. "People are getting a
growing sense that gaming is a very powerful medium," he says
passionately, a few weeks after San Jose. "As they start to think
about that, they're willing to invest more time to get down that
road. Once they've traveled a few miles, you can get them to jump at
it."
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