Visual Purple created Angel Five for crisis management training. RestOps (left), shows how to counter a chemical attack on an airbase, and Wave Guide is a training game for special operations teams. © 1996-2004 by Visual Purple Llc. All rights reserved.

In summary, Serious Games is a very new area, one that can bring together very different communities. On the one hand are the gaming creatives, who are great at basic gaming elements — how to put story, motivation, competition, character development and other elements into the game. They are typically not very good at using games to train people to do certain tasks. On the other side are the training experts, who know what training they need, but don’t understand gaming elements — left to their own devices, they would come up with a simulation that took the trainee through a series of tasks, and then tested him/her afterwards to see whether the training “took” — if possible, with exact numerical scores that could be tabulated. Missing in such a “game” would be any element of fun or motivation. Unfortunately, nobody wants to play that kind of game. By using some of the elements of games — but forgetting the most important ones — such training-oriented designers are guilty of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, so to speak.

Author/professor Jim Gee (left) and author Marc Prensky are two pioneers who research how gaming can be applied to learning situations. Photo credit: Jim Allen (right).

Somewhere in the middle are university researchers such as Professor Jim Gee, professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, who are looking at the reasons why games (when designed well) can be so effective at educating. Marc Prensky, the author of Digital Game-Based Learning, is another pioneer in this area, and a supporter of many of the clubs and associations that are pushing and supporting Serious Games (www.marcprensky.com). They are among the research pioneers shedding light on how gaming can best be applied to a whole range of learning situations, including many (such as medicine) where lives may be at stake.

Serious game developers are a fascinating mix, with the vitality and wild creativity of the entertainment side, but with the focused view of training developers that often have very serious clients. It is increasingly difficult to enter the mainstream entertainment market — due to the risk aversion of publishers who are unwilling to invest many millions into an unknown quantity, and would rather stay with the tried and true route of yet another sequel or game based on a movie. In contrast, the Serious Games market is a brand new outlet for creative types to develop games that will not only be fun and playable — but that may make a real difference in the world.

Christopher Harz is an executive consultant for new media. He has produced video games for films such as Spawn, The Fifth Element, Titanic and Lost in Space. As Perceptronics svp of program development, Harz helped build the first massively multiplayer online game worlds, including the $240 million 3-D SIMNET. He worked on C3I, combat robots and war gaming at the RAND Corp., the military think tank.