Horizon Zero

Stand Back! I'm Going To Try Science!

For a decade, scientists had attempted to solve the structure of a complex retrovirus enzyme, to no avail. In what will be hailed as a stroke of genius, they decided to call in support in the form of gamers.

The gamers provided a solution in three weeks.

The playerbase in question is for Foldit, a Serious Game developed at the University of Washington. It makes use of crowdsourcing and the human brain's still superior pattern matching and intuitive abilities to make connections that software would still miss.

And it's a victory for more than just our brains - cracking the structure of this particular enzyme may contribute to finding a way to block similar enzymes associated with HIV.

GameSave: All Your Disaster Relief Are Belong To Us

Here's another Serious Game project sponsored by Geeks Without Bounds.

"GameSave is a hack-a-thon style event which takes place over the course of 5 weeks, during which multiple teams of game developers and emergency relief professionals will each create a complete game concept and working demo aimed at an aspect of disaster relief."

Sounds cool. I wish I had a development team that could participate. We're sitting on a wealth of emergency response and preparedness material here.

 

Crowdsourcing Anti-Submarine Warfare Training

DARPA has released a free game developed by military sim company Sonalysts. The game tasks you with tracking submarines while negotiating waters filled with non-combatants. As players progress through the scenarios they have the option of uploading their winning tactics to DARPA, which will integrate them into the serious sim used to train Naval officers in anti-submarine tactics.

Hat tip to Blues News.

Building an Educational Convergence Culture

Back from Washington D.C. where I was attending the 2006 Serious Games Summit. An enjoyable time was had by all, or at least by me. I guess I count as 'all' since I'm the only person from my company who went.

The buzzword this year was 'convergence culture' and the keynote focused on the positive benefits not just of games based learning but all the attendent 'meta' activity that games and entertainment tends to generate in our wired culture. The example used was a television show like Lost. Not only do people watch Lost: The Television Show, they get together online to discuss things in newsgroups, play Lost: The Experience and purchase merchandising tie-ins like the "Bad Twin" novel that showed up last season. They even engage in rather sophisticated intelligence gathering in order to glean spoilers out of press releases, television stills and interviews - and I'd wager that the unofficial Lost intel community has a better track record overall than several honest to goodness intelligence agencies out there.

Imagine being able to take this kind of multi-genre enthusiasm and point it towards an educational or training purpose. No one's quite sure how to do it just yet - the best examples of convergence culture are spontaneous and decentralized - but there are a lot of people very interested in finding a way.

Serious Games Summit '06

Guess who's going? :)

Learning with Sephiroth?

The 2006 Serious Games Summit is going on this week in San Jose, as a part of the 2006 Game Developer's Conference. One of the SGS attendees posted the following bit of news on the Serious Games mailing list this evening.

Hi all,

I just came back from SGS, and heard a big news from Japan.

SQUARE ENIX announced they are going to start up a serious games
company, named "SG Lab" with Gakken, one of the major Japanese
educational publisher. President Wada of Square Enix clearly
stated that they will seriously work on serious game business.
They set the first-year target revenue of the company at 10 billion yen
(roughly $9 million).

The news spread out to the media widely, and non-gamer media
like major newspapers delivered the news. This is probably the
first time that the word Serious Games spread out to the non-gamer media.
This should be the wake-up call that serious games Japan market really
starts to grow.

This indicates well that the big difference of serious games business 
between the US and Japan is that the huge game companies are willing to
be the major players in Japan, which is unlikely in the US companies.
Companies like Nintendo, Namco, Sega, Konami, and Square Enix are
already the players in the serious games market in some sort.

This is interesting to see, especially coming after one of the major presentations at the SGS, "What's Wrong With Serious Gaming", which covered why the whole Serious Games concept seems to be having a difficult time catching on with commercial developers in the United States.

Maybe if Square Enix can pull off a profitable Serious Games venture in Japan it will spur development here.

Serious Games for the Win!

This article at StrategyPage is yet more evidence supporting the argument that Geek Nation is driving our military/commercial/political successes.

Serious Games: Food Force

I've been more than a little critical of the United Nations in the past, but that criticism focuses mostly on the leadership and organizational culture of the world body. For all the corruption at the top, they still do quite a bit of good - and the World Food Program has found an innovative way to increase public awareness: Food Force.

Food Force is a Serious Game - software entertainment used for educational or instructional purposes. The concept has spawned a growing movement, appropriately called the Serious Games Initiative. It's a very diverse collection of professionals, ranging from university professors to corporate training gurus to game developers to the military. Serious Game mailing lists and discussion groups are springing up, and there's already a dedicated development track for Serious Games at the annual Game Developers Conference.

The WFP's Food Force puts the player in charge of relief missions to the fictional island nation of Sheylan. The missions themselves range from overhead action - flying helicopters and flying trucks - to logistic/economic strategy to SimCity style village/urban planning.

Is it the kind of AAA title you'd see on the store shelves down at EBGames? Well, no - although many of the Serious Games titles under development make use of off the shelf engines, or even began life as ambitious mods. But with the 'gaming metaphor' firmly entrenched with pretty much anyone under 30, gaming provides an excellent platform for transmitting information.

I had a teacher who told me that the best learning experiences are when the student forgets that he's in a classroom. Serious Games have the potential to sneak valuable educational time into a recreational setting.

Trick 'em into learning? Seriously good idea.