As Sergeant Smith, you find yourself in Baghdad. Your first mission is to find and meet with the local honcho. You walk over to a sidewalk café, and approach an Iraqi gentleman (you know better than to approach an Iraqi lady). You greet him, with the appropriate gestures. You see positive symbols rise above the man, game-induced feedback that you're scoring "trust" points, what some people might call "social capital." You ask what area you are in, and who's in charge. You see the man start to scowl, and the trust symbols turning negative. Oh, oh, something's wrong. Tension mounts. The air becomes so thick you could cut it with a knife. You sense the man is going to say something to you, and it will be nasty. You also sense that there are many more of them than there are of you. But you have two things going for you, fortunately -- you're still at the "beginner" level, and you have your trusty (automated) assistant, a fellow NCO, standing next to you, who helpfully suggests that you might want to introduce yourself first. Ahhh, that was how you blew it.

You apologize deeply, overdo it a little bit with the bowing and introduce yourself with your name, and unit and what you are doing there -- you're part of a rebuilding team, trying to repair a local first aid clinic. You thank the man for any help he may be able to give you. You start thinking about how all this thanking and apologizing and bowing is really, really different from the typical entertainment-oriented videogame. But there is hope -- the man starts to relax and smile, the tension loosens a little and the trust symbols turn green again and he replies that he understands what you are doing. You ask him who the local chieftain is, and how you could meet him and the man starts to help you. You are not through the woods yet, but you have passed the first test.

Players start with Skill Builder, an interactive area where basic Arabic vocabulary is taught. Using earphones and a mike, players get immediate feedback on mistakes.

You still have many other missions ahead of you, including attending a local dinner, manning a checkpoint, attending a wedding, and so on. Each will build your repertoire further. Each will test your understanding of local culture, your vocabulary, and your pronunciation - the game monitors your speech throughout, and a mispronounced word may bring you the beginning of a dust-up. Gradually, confidence increases, you move up to "expert" and you start to respond to situations instinctively, without having to carefully redact everything you say.

The Game Development
Whereas the development of entertainment-oriented videogames is relatively well understood, and can be found described in many textbooks and instruction manuals, the development of serious games appears to still be as much of an art as it is a science. A serious game needs to toe a fine line between being a traditional training tool (and thus prone to being boring and overly academic) and an entertainment venue (and thus irrelevant for learning anything about the task at hand). On the one hand, academic developers tend to, in the words of Professor Linda Polin of Pepperdine University, an expert in GBL (Game Based Learning), "Suck all the fun out of a game." On the other hand, most game developers like to make a game really challenging and cutting edge -- which is great for hard core gamers, but would leave most average students behind in the dust.

"We don't have the luxury of picking our audience, like a commercial game, which can afford to lose a lot of potential players," noted Dr. Johnson. "We didn't have that kind of leeway -- we couldn't develop a game that half of the soldiers couldn't understand. We had to make sure that the game was playable by just about every war fighter that would need to use it. The game should not irritate the player, and make him give up. It should remain a fun challenge -- what Jim Gee (a gaming guru) calls 'pleasantly frustrating.'"

Because serious games typically have very limited development times and budgets (compared to major commercial games, which typically run more than $10 million and take two to four years to produce), they tend to be created using a lot of existing middleware, including game engines. This was the case with Tactical Iraqi, which uses the Unreal Tournament 2003 videogame engine. Although the original Unreal is an FPS (First Person Shooter) game, its adaptation lets you move your avatar (your game character) around richly detailed streets and meet well-rendered game characters -- but does not let you shoot them if they do not agree with you. Although Tactical Iraqi's development time was about normal for serious games (a little more than a year), its budget, at around $7.2 million, was higher than the normal $1 million range for such games -- but so were the requirements for the game, and the features that had to be developed.

One major game element that had to be created was the AI for the assistant and the other "smart" NPCs (Non Playing Characters) in the game. The reason for this is that the other characters are not "manned" -- they are not activated by other players, but by the AI software, and must automatically react appropriately to the actions of the player. Whereas other parts of the game may use some short cuts (the number of cars on the street may be limited, for instance, and their license plates may not be totally correct), the accuracy of the AI had to be exactly right, else the game risked misinforming the player about what to expect in real life (what is termed "false training") -- which could have disastrous consequences.