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A 'Serious' Growth Area For Game Developers?
simoniker writes "The recently launched Serious Games Source website, which deals with games created for training, health, government, military, and educational uses, has an interview with the Serious Game Initiative's Ben Sawyer, in which the non-profit director, looking back at E3, comments controversially: 'I believe that every company in the games space will have a serious games related business position in the next ten years.' Sawyer especially referenced Square Enix's recent announcement that it has created a subsidiary to 'develop and distribute edutainment style software'. How many of our traditional education and training courses will be taken over by games over the next few years?"
Back in the day....
Selling those 8 bit Commodores, "back in the day", the educational software market was huge...MAvis Beacon, Carmen Sandiego. Most adults bought the machine for their kids and the first software purchase was for education...then games. It wasn't until the later 8 bit years nearing the 16 bit years that games took off bigger than educational software.
Gregor
Better get that checked out...
When long division becomes as fun as slapping hookers, stealing cars, and mowing down hordes of aliens with a chaingun....
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Like the use for Farcry for geovisualization*
*I have plenty more were that came from for anyone interested.
"How many of our traditional education and training courses will be taken over by games over the next few years?"
All of them. I'm particularly looking forward to playing Super Quantum Chromodynamics Brothers II, Welfare Fraud Investigator Deluxe, and Tom Clancy's: State Farm Policy Insurance Ghost Writer.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Education alone is entertaining. Why should a lesson on grammar (or covalent bonds, or anything) be combined with some sick shooter game that promotes immoral behavior in children? How about more learning in the classroom and less clowning around with stupid games. Games for for smelling, jobless losers that try to scam people eBay so they can buy that new gaming console/lame hardware.
The best company in the world
It's all this jumpstart crud, just videos with random slight interaction at moments.
Give us the glory days of the 80s, when edutainment games were actually games at least some of the time. GIVE US ROBOT ODYSSEY!
I think there was a /. article a few months back that talked a bit about the increasing use of combat simulators in military training programs. What software developer wouldn't want to tap into the [infinitely deep] pockets of the government?
Virtual Heroes, the development house behind Americas Army, is working on several pretty neat titles. I don't know how much I can talk about these, since I toured their development studios - but they're working on a collaborative team-based puzzle space game, where teams are provided a problem and have to work out a solution (think Apollo 13). They're also working on nurse and emergency responder simulation training games - editing a game to include new basic emergency responder techniques is easier and faster to distribute than manuals and training personel.
Flight Simulator?
I would like to see more open ended games that didn't involve killing people or being a criminal.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The time is ripe to pitch these blockbuster web-app edutainment titles:
The Matrix: Excess XSS
and
The Matrix SQL: Injected
...pending franchise approval, of course.
(The Brothers Wack' have already covered buffer overruns.)
Oooh, it has "interactive movies" too... I'm actually salivating, "play an interactive movie: help create characters, shift the story line, change the situation, watch something different happen each time - cable in the VCR and edit your home videos." I'm sure that's going to beat the heck out of playing games! (Note, article is from May/Jun 1993 and titled "3DO: Hip or Hype? Is it the next Apple, Microsoft, and Nintendo rolled into one? Or is it too good to be true? Joe Flower finds out.")
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
The relaunched site, Yahoo Serious Games Source, is now in beta testing in Australia.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Gram's Stain or Die. Serial Dilution to 10^9 and Get the Power-Up! Streak Plating Gone Wild! Name That Pathogen!
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
I think dating sims are a great start to this, but they are all fantasy based, very unrealistic etc. I'd love to see a video game that uses real life video of people to train you to better read facial expressions and body language as well as to learn good responses to situations that may cause social anxiety.
If anybody can think of any currently existing titles that are good for this, by all means please post them.
And for you smartasses who are going to answer "I got a game for you, its called Real Life"....my response to you is that as someone with Social Anxiety Disorder, it isn't always as simple as "oh, I'm nervous around people so I'll go talk to as many as I can to try to get over this". Often times there is a specific underlying fear of the social interaction itself (or many fears) that need to be worked on before someone is able to test their skills out on a real person. I honestly think that the one person qualified to make such a game would be David DeAngelo. Some of his stuff may be fluff and an attempt at pushing more product, but at his core, he knows his shit and he speaks the brutal truth about interaction with the opposite sex.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Warning: "serious" is overloaded in this context:
"serious games"
Found 2 possible classes:
"Serious::Game" in namespace "Croteam"
"Serious::Game" in namespace "adjective"
Didn't anybody else think <voice="Serious Sam">"Cool - Croateam are doing more Serious games - let's get our Serious Bombs and go kick some serious ass!"</voice>
www.eFax.com are spammers
*hesitates to click the Post Anonymously button*
You just got troll'd!
I think dating sims are a great start to this, but they are all fantasy based, very unrealistic etc. I'd love to see a video game that uses real life video of people to train you to better read facial expressions and body language as well as to learn good responses to situations that may cause social anxiety.
If anybody can think of any currently existing titles that are good for this, by all means please post them.
Hmmm. How about the Sims 2? Specifically, the Hot Date, University, and Nightlife expansions for that?
They're all fairly accurate, with a little bit of humorous silliness thrown in so it's not boring.
There's a reason why the Sims is the most widely sold computer game - most of the players are actually women and girls, in fact. But most game mechanics are based on actual psychology and sociology studies.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Atom smasher- a physically realistic simulation of what happens when you take one particle and fire it at another at a good fraction of the speed of light. They could leave out a lot of really obscure stuff that would probably be hard to simulate anyway, maybe just go to energy levels used in accelerators say from 30-50 years ago.
Also add something like a virtual solar furnace/big bang that would allow you to start out with hydrogen and try to build increasingly heavier elements.
Chemical construction kit- grab a hold of atoms and molecules and try to jam them together to create bigger and more complex molecules. Lots of that would be very hard to simulate too, so it could be more of a cartoon rather than always 100% accurate.
For any of those you could still have a conventional game, but just switch things up by make the games mechanical physics accurate to increasingly microscopic scales- and the characters would shrink too, so the computational load would be be increased by having more fine-grained simulation but that would be offset by reducing the scope of the playable world.
Any piece of software now that is used by engineers or scientists to model various phenomena is going to be something a game could incorporate as computing power increases. Right now there's a lot of interesting simulation software that is only used by engineers and scientists, and they are expensive and very hard to use- but they should be something that in 5-10 years is just another effect to turn on in the Unreal 25 engine or whatever. A child could get an intuitive understanding of high-mach number air flows over various shapes if you put an easy to use interface on a CFD package.
I think games like that would give me and students a more intuitive feel for processes beyond ordinary experience, so that if and when we do learn the real math and underlying principles it will seem very natural.
Morpheus: "Neo, you forgot to escape input you received from the user. You know what that means?"
Neo: "No, Morpheus."
Morpheus: "It means everyone who does business with the Bank of Zion is about to get their identity hijacked and the next time you get together with Trinity she will actually be a 40 year old Russian Man."
Neo: "Whoa."
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I wish we had this in my Economics Department... Video games for college credit is possibly the best idea ever.
If Civ counted for History credit, I'd probably have a PhD in it by now.
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Would anyone really consider educational software that starts by butchering the language with an ugly marketing hybrid word like "edutainment"?