A Serious Look at Serious Gaming
There’s a lot of buzz around Serious Games, a term almost unknown a few years ago, but now a hot topic in the gaming and animation world. The Serious Games Summit used to be a sideshow at the Game Developers Conference, with only a few dozen attendees. Last year the Serious Games Summit had an overflow crowd at its inauguration as a separate show of its own, in the Washington, D.C. area. Serious Games last year had somewhere around $50-100 million in funding, which is, well, serious money. At a time when production of mainstream entertainment games is becoming increasingly costly (over $5 million per copy) and risky (less than 10% of games produced turn a real profit), many of the smaller studios are looking at Serious Games as a source of extra revenue.
Background Whereas the military was one of the first customers of Serious Games, it is being joined by a long line of users, including other government agencies (the State Department, the Intelligence Community, the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the National Science Foundation and even the Agriculture Department), schools (both K-12 and universities) and Fortune 500 companies (for team building, leadership training, sales training and product education, among others).
Serious Games are games used for other than entertainment purposes. “Games” in this context are usually physically similar to commercial videogames, playable on game consoles or PCs, and distinguished from the more elaborate simulators that the military uses. A typical military simulator for an M1A2 tank, for instance, costs around a million or so, and weighs a ton, which means it’s pretty hard to schlep it around. Networks of such simulators may be good for teaching classic warfare tactics such as “shoot anything that moves,” but they don’t develop people-to-people skills much, and that is what the Army increasingly needs now, as menacing hordes of enemy tanks are harder and harder to come by, while incidents of clashes with people are occurring without letup. Suddenly the military is a major fan of videogame-style story-driven games, and is developing games such as America’s Army, which are actually showing users which people not to shoot. The military services and other government agencies are shopping around for Serious Games to perform a wide variety of tasks, including medical training, driving in convoys through hostile areas, language learning, working with law enforcement and firefighters (for homeland defense), getting ready to go to Boot Camp, and making unit leaders able to deal with people problems such as misunderstandings arising from cultural diversity.
There are three basic categories of Serious Games. The first type is games that have been developed from the ground up to be used for serious purposes only, such as Joint Force Employment, developed by Cornerstone for the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The challenge with such games is finding a large enough market to cover development costs. If the game is for government purposes this may not be a serious problem, as the government usually covers all development costs (with partial upfront payments) of games that it wants.
The second category is games developed for the entertainment market that happen to also be useful for serious applications, such as NovaLogic’s tank game, Armored Fist, an entertainment game with enough realism to let it be used for training commanders of armored units. A third category is hybrid games, which are either modified or developed from the outset to be released for both entertainment and serious markets, such as Close Combat Marines, a modification of the entertainment game Close Combat, from Atomic Games (now Destineer Studios).
There have been some crossover hits, such as America’s Army, which was developed for military purposes, but has become so popular internationally (with some 5 million online players) that it is coming out this summer on both the PS2 and Xbox.
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