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For those of you who didn't read the article, here's some of the interesting points:

A) Academics are looking for the DoD to fund studies of some of the social principles behind MMOGs. The ADL, I think, is a government-academic-corporate initiative to apply "new learning techniques" to the military.
B) As many of us know, militaries are always eager to increase training time, and to inculcate the "military mindset" into soldiers 24/7. That's just common sense: the more the rank and file sees the world in the same way and understands events similarly ("Is on the same page"), the less friction there is.
C) MMOGs have some interesting phenomena: they are world-wide distributed environments where new players are socialized and "taught the ropes" by the old hands. Any environment where leaders naturally emerge, and people willingly provide training in complex activities automatically generates interest for the military.
D) Online shopping mall-cum-anemically performing-MMOG there has managed to team up with the army to build some sort of training environment. Expect hoverboard-riding soldiers wearing custom-designed hawaiian shirts to invade a country near you.

On the other hand, there are some problems with the scope and conception of the project.
First, the study focuses on MMORPGs. Massively multiplayer online simulations, such as the flight simulator Aces High and military-style "MMORPG"s, such as the persistent combined-arms battlefield World War II Online, or even the science-fiction combat game planetside, while certainly not as popular as the "big boys", have tasks that are, relatively speaking, much more sophisticated technically, and have evolved social structures around achieving those tasks. Something like the AAR effectiveness experiment they propose would be much better suited to an environment like that then to say a mission in City of Heroes. In addition, the rhetorical gap between the reality to be described and the narrative the DoD would fund is much narrower. For that matter, the gap between the description of MMOG and the military's use of computer games would be narrower too.

Another issue skirted in the paper is the failure rate of individual subscribers. While certainly, MMOGs are very popular; I'd say a relatively minor percentage of players play any given MMOG for more than a few months. And many last shorter than that, and that is often precisely because of the social environment they create. The article mentions the Sims online as not being popular; There is another example: Their beta lasted the least amount of time of any game on my hard drive: I logged on to some stupid technicolor world, and as I tried to sort the counterintuitive interface, I discovered the place to be populated by poorly socialized adolescents. Given the choice between learning the interface and deleting the software, I chose the latter. The fact that these communities are self-selecting, and that some of these communities have broad reach, while others do not, separates them from military applications. Would a MMORPG used for military training work? Or would it be dominated by those guys who can't even scrub a latrine right?

Finally, I'm just not sure MMOGs should be considered independently of the current gaming environment as a whole; the article suggests this, but I think we can go further, and suggest that the social division between MMORPGs and regular games with significant online components is indeed an artificial division. If you look at the communities for online games that have direct applications as training tools, such as the R6/GR series, the mods to Falcon 4.0, Battlefront's whole product line and, of course, a href=www.flashpoint1985.com>Operation Flashpoint, and its military twin,

Check out politika, if you can find it.
Look here
And something more recent: Republic

A place to start. If people find others, please post.

You really believe delta-compression was invented with Q3, don't you? :-\

Sorry, but this is getting boring. Technically the engines are great, but... Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3/Quake 3:TA, "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", Doom 3, Quake 4... it's getting a little bit repetitive.

The Looking Glass people did it right with Thief. Red Storm built Rainbow Six around good gameplay, but a crap engine and the worst netcode I've experienced (well, that's a lie -- I'm not counting Operation Flashpoint since I consider it Beta). Couldn't ID take their tech to the tactical level?

I've been waiting for ID to whip up a real good CRPG using a state-of-the-art 3d-engine for some time now... I hope those people over at ID can enjoy games from some other genre than just straight action-FPS, or they'll fade away... I'm not seeing myself buying any of their FPS anyhow. <shrug>.

Ah well, guess we have Bioware and Gas Powered Games to refine and put out some great gameplay for us.

Chris Taylor and John Carmack teaming up, now that could be interesting. Or maybe Jane Jensen doing another Gabriel Knight using Carmack-o-tech. Anything BUT ANOTHER FPS!

I have a CS degree (plus a number of EE and CompE hardware classes and most of the coursework for a PhD in CS).

In my paid work, I rarely use any of my coursework. Most of what I do could be done by any smart person with no degree at all. I work in sort of a traditional IS role, building stuff for the business world. Boring at times, but it pays the bills.

Where would I get good use of a CS degree? I see two places: heavy software engineering methodology and heavy math. I did heavy math when I did cardiac MRI software at Siemens. I could do the same somewhere else doing machine learning stuff, 3D graphics, etc. Or I could go to a big company that follows formal SE methodologies.

I work with some people with CIS/MIS degrees. They mainly stick to traditional IS stuff on IBM boxes. Some write code, some do business analysis crud.

I think it all depends on what you want to do. If you want to live in a cube at a big company, CIS or MIS will be fine. CS would work there too, but if you learn the right stuff you should have the option to go do something more exciting. (A friend of mine from college, Greg Stelmack, did this. He went from boring corporate stuff to working on games at Red Storm. It would have been hard to do this without a good math background.)

Virtus used to make architectural 3D design software. One of their success stories was James Cameron using their software to lay out the sets for The Abyss and realizing he could drop an entire wing of one set, directly saving him $1million in construction costs. They've reincorporated as Virtus Entertainment now, and taken their 3d modeling into the gaming arena with their subsidiary company Red Storm and other related ventures.

The eds and writers at Gamecenter.com aren't exactly the greatest source for true gaming information. The purist and hardcore gamers get their information from sites dedicated to their favorite type of gaming, even to the point of shunning the psuedo-targetted gaming sites like the GameSpy network (www.planetquake.com, www.planetunreal.com, etc).

The future of the gaming industry is my forte. Hell, it'll be my thesis when I hit the point where I want a doctorate. And believe me when I say that the biggest cause of any genre of game "dying off", as they put it, is due to corporate and VC pressure to stick to things that they know work. Gaming companies are less likely to go out on a limb and innovate in their games. The few that do don't end up with the funding for the mainstream marketting thats needed to compete with the big publishes. Its alot like the music industry right now - except no Napster.

Gaming is becomming more and more about making profits than it is about making games. Companies are producing things that are very much clones of things that sold well. Instead of trying to recreate a good engine, and possibly comming up with new interesting innovations, the companies opt to simply license the engine and make minor upgrades to it. Look at all the various commercial games (not player-made mods) that came out on the Quake2 engine. It was pathetic in my opinion. The only game using the Q2 engine which caught my attention was KingPin: Life of Crime, and still that was only a so-so game. It was only different in that it offered much more of a story than the others.

Its the large publishers like Interplay and Sierra who are just drowning the game market with these 2-bit titles based on other games. And its these clones that are tiring players out, and confusing them. Titles that are truly different from the pack get hidden behind the clones. FPS games like Rainbow Six and its sequel Rogue Spear that were very much different from the fragfests of Quake didn't get noticed. But games like Soldier of Fortune take the spotlight because they're using the hottest latest (licensed) engine, when all they're really doing is adding some new graphics and more blood and making the genre a little more stale.

What game design teams really need to do is stop producing clones of other peoples' work, and start working on their own innovations and interesting games. Licensing of engines is fine, when done to a degree and when signifigant changes to the original game are made. Quality games are becomming more and more difficult to find due to the flood of clones. Not all licensed engines turn into junk games, but the amount of them coming out is making it very difficult for gamers to choose which ones to own and which to ignore. If an avid RPG gamer who enjoyed Baldur's Gate decides she wants to play more of those games, does she purchase IceWind Dale or Planescape: Torment, or the Tales of Sword Coast? In my opinion, Planescape: Torment blows the others away, even the original Baldurs Gate. But reviewers can't tell you if you'll like a game or not, or if you'll like it better than another game (and this is only made worse by reviewers who sell out to game companies or to generate clicks).


More and more games are going online. As an AI designer I can understand this. Its very difficult to write an AI which gets close to simulating a real opponent without using too much cpu power. Also, online games provide the sense of community and friendly rivalry that is lacking in singleplayer games. But the online world still suffers from the same problems that the singleplayer world suffers from. Funding is not provided to game companies with a radically different idea.

The original NeverWinter Nights was a superb game. It had a large base of absolutely fanatical players. AOL made one of their biggest mistakes by shutting it down. With modern network technology the original NWN could become 10x's what it was limited to on AOL. But no game company now would be willing to do that, because it isn't "safe" for them to do so. The companies see that there aren't enough clones of the original NWN around to make it a surefire sale. Its ironic that NWN, something alot of people who've played it consider pivitol, was only created due to alot of GoldBox clones.. In other words, it takes a saturation of clones in order for a game to become worth of support by a publisher. But its the saturation of clones that confuses gamers and makes them bored of the genre.

More power to the Garage Developers. More power to Forgotten World, Shattered Galaxy, and all design teams that can create thier ideas from scratch.

And the link:

http://www.redstorm.com/rogue_spear/

Redstorm's new 3D RTS Force21 looks like it was designed to be the definitive non-turn-based land war simulation (even though its set 15-20 odd years from now)... they even had a Persian Gulf General as an advisor/designer.