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NASA's Educational Game Proposal Deadline Extended
NASA MMO Team writes "Due to the additional time required to respond to the number of questions that were raised during the NASA Massively Multiplayer Online Educational Game RFP Briefing held on April 21, 2008 in Baltimore, MD, we have decided to extend the RFP Proposal response date to Monday, July 21, 2008 at 12:00 midnight EDT. ... Please contact the NASA Learning Technologies Project Office at mmo@nasa.gov with any additional questions." (NASA has set up a site with additional information on the NASA MMO Education Game project, too.)
Well, NASA is requiring that people build an MMORPG and be unable to sell it. And the reward for the people making it? You get "limited brand placement".
So, you get to make a game to popularize NASA, but you can't sell it, and you can only make money off of brand placement. Oh, and it gets better. You also have to stick to deadlines that NASA sets, and the entire end product is subject to their approval.
I can't imagine why there are not hundreds of companies applying to give all of their development time to a project that will make almost no return on investment. Investors love giving away money for free based on vague promises and loss of control of their own product!
Now we may never know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space.
That's a somewhat pessimistic view, sure.
... so while we're focusing on our commercial game, we can crank this out for the free labor and the advertising potential while our main goal remains Y..."
A slightly more optomisitic view is "gee, there's no transfer of money, but we do get X thousand hours of free NASA employee labor, and we can advertise that our framework is running the game
Simple. CCP should be all over this.
Add the known stars in the Milky Way and known exoplanets, our solar system into this different version of EVE Online, and add the simulation of orbital mechanics to the whole lot, as well as the ability to simulate surface landings and you're done.
Hey CCP! Send me a copy of yer source so I can mod it for NASA's use. I'll mention you guys in the credits...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
All the ideas I've heard for this game involve it being similar to Eve. My idea is to go a different direction: make this game a simulation of starting a space colony.
When players sign up, they get to choose what colony they join. Each colony would be on some sort of planet -- maybe one would be Mars-based, one based on Venus, one Earth-like, etc. Maybe they have some sort of profession, too. The gameplay would be similar to A Tale in the Desert (note: I've never played that game, so I'm basing this on what I've heard about it). The residents of a colony will have to work together to make laws, build new buildings, run experiments, etc. All the things that would happen in a real colony. At various times they would recieve supplies from Earth, but maybe there are occasional emergencies like the supplies being lost. Maybe the endgame for a colony would be to become self-sufficient.
Here's one catch, though: In order to have new residents move in, there needs to be housing for them. So one of the decisions the residents will have to make is how much housing to build. Maybe they have enough supplies to build more housing or a new research building, but not both. And along with housing, they have to have the resouces to support the new residents (food, water, oxygen, etc). New residents won't just come from new players, though -- people will be able to transfer between colonies (maybe once a month, there'll be an opportunity to change. This way, people won't just hop around all the time). Part of the game will involve trying to attract people from other colonies, and maybe even selecting who gets to come if there are more transfers than they can accept.
Another thing the residents of a colony will have to do is justify their existence to Earth. That means making science breakthroughs, constantly expanding, showing that they're a fair society, and so on. If they can't prove that they're useful, or if one person takes over and becomes a dictator, they might find their funding dry up and all the residents will be forced to transfer.
There would be other aspects to the game as well, but this gives you all a good idea of what it would be like. I don't know if something like this would be fun to play or not, but with the number of people who like non-violent games like Second Life, there may be a niche community who would enjoy it. I know I would play it.
Thoughts, anyone?
The mmo@nasa.gov email address is incorrect. Questions should go to daniel.d.laughlin@nasa.gov. The other address does not exist.
Check out the attendance list from their conference.. I'm sure they will have plenty of applications judging by the interest shown there. Don't get me wrong, not being able to recieve funding from NASA may disinterest some parties, but still.. Also, did you examine the RFP requirements? Lots to fill in there considering potential applicants have only had a month since the conference... As for gamestyle ideas, I may hang myself if someone suggests "EVE-style" yet again. Firstly, CCP will have no interest in this; Why would they, without financial incentive, offer resources to a project that could potentially compete with them? Moreover, they're game engine would be fairly ineffectual for what NASA is looking for. EVE has pretty graphics and possibly usable(if expanded) economic functions, but as far as space itself not-so-much. NASA wants to be able to do things like "tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, and experience microgravity". Let's be honest, EVE's engine is bunk for this. A 0 m/s speed in EVE is just that; zero velocity. In reality forces are applied to all objects in any part of space, meaning constant movement based on the vector sum of forces. Without getting too in depth, let's just say that EVE was never designed to simulate these things and would have to be re-written to do so. Too bad I've got an enlistment to fulfill; This looks like a blast and I firmly believe that persistant worlds as research tools are the future of MMO ideals.
There was a lot of interest in this MMO project because of the positive karma associated with NASA -- there are a LOT of space program fans in the game industry. Unfortunately the great deal of interest and outpouring of support from the development community seems to have convinced NASA they don't need to pay for quality product.
There is no professional company who is going to deliver professional product without getting paid. What they are looking at now is the amateur market, unless someone with spare burn like Google is going to take interest. (Probably the most effective way this could be done at this point is through a Google-MMO team partnership.) AFAIK this does not include any major game companies, and in particular any major MMO companies. MMOs are still indie enough because of the business model (you're dealing directly with customers/players, you're not shipping through a publisher upon whom you depend for your milestone payments) that they have to care about their day-to-day survival. So the people who know the most about this space are not going to be able to get involved for free. By virtue of the system they are setting up NASA is looking for people who are not the best at what they do, which is very sad, because they could easily have had the best in the business. The people that I know who submitted replies to the RFI were very put off by NASA's "just kidding" gotcha with this project and want nothing further to do with it. There may be others who didn't, but there is not currently a good model for success here. If it had been initially presented this way, it might be different, but now they've alienated professional teams by bait and switch, which is more damaging than if they'd never suggested the RFI in the first place.
It would have been very feasible to make a strong core MMO for $3 mill, build a space engine with physics and interesting core gameplay and art. Not from zero, though. Anyone who can make money at this is going to be doing things that make money, executing on THEIR dreams at a professional level of investment and business. They were eager to work with NASA, but NASA is not providing enough add to make this worthwhile any longer, and that's quite sad.
What they also seem to not understand is that it takes a pro team to execute on something like this. Thinking that you can charity/indie it for nothing or use the engineering resources available to NASA and not include a professional game developer is how you get the edutainment crash.