Gaming takes a serious turn

An interactive simulator for agrologists has garnered its creator a Canadian New Media Award, the opportunity to represent Canada at an international new media competition, and a speaking slot at an upcoming conference on serious gaming. The latter is amazing, considering he no idea such a genre existed until recently. "I consider some of the stuff we do serious games; there’s a negotiation element that requires brainpower rather than a rapid trigger-finger," says Michael Gibson, president of Toronto’s Zapdramatic. Therein lies the difference between "serious" games and their more common counterparts. Serious games have, at their core, a function other than merely entertaining the user and are designed from the outside to impart a lesson or a point of view, he says. However, Gibson adds, he had no idea that serious games were a market niche until a publicist he was working with on another interactive drama project brought it to his attention. "All of a sudden I realized I wasn’t all by myself," he said. " makes you start thinking there might be more opportunities here, and maybe you ought to explore it a little bit more." The game that has attracted all this attention, titled the Professionalism and Ethics Simulation, won first place in the Excellence in Learning category at the 2005 Canadian New Media Awards in May (CNM Update, June 1/05). In recognition of the achievement, Zapdramatic’s Professionalism and Ethics Simulation was also chosen to represent Canada in the e-learning category at the World Summit Awards, an e-content and creativity competition to be held in Tunis in November and sponsored by the International Center for New Media. Gibson has also been invited to speak at the second annual Serious Games Summit in Washington DC on October 31 and November 1. "I’ve never been to one before, and just looking at some of the other people who are showing up, it boggles my mind a bit," he says. His presentation, titled "Creating Life Experience Through Dramatic Simulations," will be focused on the speed and cost-effectiveness of serious games as a teaching tool for professionals. "I’m pushing my thesis that online simulations provide years of experience in a matter of hours, and some experiences you never get ," he says. The Professionalism and Ethics Simulation is aimed at agrologists, a professionally certified and accredited group of professionals in Canada who apply hard scientific techniques to farming, livestock raising and other forms of agriculture. Jean Sullivan, manager of the Ottawa-based Agricultural Institute of Canada (AIC), says the simulation did "a great job" at imparting the information the AIC wanted agrologists to learn in a fun and less formal way. "Generally people aren’t real keen to go to an ethics course," she says. "Some of them...can be a bit dry philosophical, but adds some humour and reality to the situations." Gibson says the game took two people five months to develop. "The scripting of it, for me, is generally the hardest part, because it requires research – you have to find out how people talk in the business," he says. Because each situation in the simulation prompts the user with a number of different potential responses, the decision trees that need to be created grow exponentially with each consecutive opportunity for user interaction. However, Gibson says with several Flash-based interactive dramas under his belt, he has a feel for which options will be the most popular, and which can be developed to a lesser extent. "Trying to keep the budget down is vital if you’re trying to get people to pay you to do this kind of stuff, so you want to learn how to keep these things at a reasonable size while still giving the level of interactivity and variety that people expect." Much of the simulation’s material is drawn from a classroom-based course created by the Ontario Institute of Agrologists, the governing body for the profession in Ontario. While the course included case studies and some role-playing in groups, it could only teach a limited number of people at a time. "That was the value that Zap brought to the course," Sullivan says. "They could create a simulation that put you as the professional, facing the ethical dilemmas" in real-time, rather than in a hard-to-recreate group experience. "It’s easy to sit there and say what someone else should have done, but if you’re the one faced with what to say next, or how to get out of the situation you’ve gotten yourself into, it makes it much more immediate and you catch on to how easily you could fall into a bad situation," Sullivan says. Within the game, decisions that seem innocuous at first glance – such as not disclosing the fact that you went to high school with a member of the farming family you’ve been assigned to work with – can lead to a disastrous outcome. However, notes Gibson, a simulated or virtual professional disgrace is better than a real-world one. "It’s not a ‘what’, it’s a ‘how’ that’s shown when you’re actually playing, and it’s the ‘how’ that happens that’s very hard to explain in a book." For her part, Sullivan says her next task is to contact the agrologists who’ve already worked through the simulation and try to quantify its results and success. "That’s the other challenge with online learning: unless I have a reason to contact them and follow up, they kind of do it, they go on their way and I never hear from them." Perhaps the highest-profile example of a serious game in simulation form is one developed for the U.S. military. "America’s Army" was created as a recruitment tool for the U.S. Army, allowing players to assume the role of a Special Forces operative on a variety of missions. The U.S. Army has drawn criticism for using video games to reach a younger audience of potential recruits, but Gibson says that part of the game’s agenda is reasonably transparent. "As soon as you’re trying to manipulate people for an undisclosed goal, we’re getting Orwellian," he says. "There’s this whole literacy of media that’s coming along with it – I’m sure there will be people who are gullible and get caught up in that kind of stuff, but I think a lot of people are almost the other way, they’re almost immune to those kinds of messages, and it’s becoming harder to persuade them if they don’t want to be persuaded." While the interest in serious gaming is likely to grow in the near future, Gibson says that perhaps not every lesson or subject is suited to such an adaptation, programmer skill and creativity notwithstanding. "There’s an awful lot of stuff that is deadly dull, and I don’t know how you learn it other than just memorizing the stuff," he notes. Conversely, despite his involvement in the more serious side of gaming technology, he says, even seemingly trivial games can impart a lesson – as long as they’re grounded in reality. "I remember playing a game called Diplomacy and it was all about fighting wars in Europe." After several plays, "you began to learn where the countries were," he says.

Gaming takes a serious turn

News | 09/16/2005 4:00 am EDT

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