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US Gives Raytheon $10.5M For 'Serious Games'
coondoggie writes "These aren't your basic video gaming systems here. The U.S. government gave Raytheon BBN Technologies $10.5 million today to develop what it called 'serious games' that feature an international detective theme developed by game designers, cognitive psychologists and experts in intelligence analysis."
...it's good to see our government spending money on games.
Although the biases they show are true problems, it almost seems like it could also do conditioning, unaware of the player's conscious mind.
Secondly, it really seems like our government is going out in all directions(such as pizza) just to avoid the money problem. They're in constant denial..
They just spent $10.5 million to remake Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
I've never heard of Raythorn BBN Technologies and I bet you haven't either. So here.
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Will educational games (more serious and presumably less fun than an ordinary first person shooting rampage through a novel virtual environment) improve your ability to make decisions or track objects, analogous to the improvements documented for recreational FPS games? The US government wants to know because it's recently become clear that playing video games does improve performance. Nature Reviews Neuroscience has a nice review on the issue this week, "Brains on video games" http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v12/n12/abs/nrn3135.html
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
http://bbn.com/news_and_events/press_releases/2011/pr_sirius_111711
Actually it looks like a good idea to me from that.
She said she wanted information on good rock climbing places.
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"She might even steal your heart, so I might warn ya / She's so damn hot when she rocks her red fedora" - from YTCracker's verse on Carmen Sandiego Has Really Bad Morals
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Or maybe tic-tac-toe?
Somehow I can't help but feel this money would have been better allocated to a game developer instead of a defense contractor.
Defense contractors aren't typically know for their user friendly software, with cutting edge graphics, written by a talented team of passionate game programmers/artists using off the shelf software, built on a low maintenance proven code base, with a reasonable budget and delivered on time.
But hey what do I know.
Serious Sam
just to make L.A. Noire playable?
In the middle of the greatest deficit it's good to see our government spending money on games.
Serious games are actually useful and they can save not only money but lives. One area of serious gaming are training simulators. Think beyond flight simulators. They are serious games that teach soldiers how to interact with members of a very different culture. There are serious games that present fire fighters with different types of chemical spills to see how they handle it and react to unfolding events. This particular game also has a very serious and seemingly worthwhile goal:
"The goal of the Sirius Program is to create experimental Serious Games to train participants and measure their proficiency in recognizing and mitigating the cognitive biases that commonly affect all types of intelligence analysis. The research objective is to experimentally manipulate variables in Serious Games and to determine whether and how such variables might enable player-participant recognition and persistent mitigation of cognitive biases. The Program will provide a basis for experimental repeatability and independent validation of effects, and identify critical elements of design for effective analytic training in Serious Games. The cognitive biases of interest that will be examined include: (1) Confirmation Bias, (2) Fundamental Attribution Error, (3) Bias Blind Spot, (4) Anchoring Bias, (5) Representativeness Bias, and (6) Projection Bias."
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=1793ab48906acabaf923c76486c29c0f&_cview=0
Average game development costs are estimated to be around $20M-$30M
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_development
..over 20M in 2010
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/108/1082176p1.html
Obviously the forces driving commercial games and games for the public sector are different, but the relative cost shouldn't be ignored.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
I can use more serious games in my life. A hundred percent serious, nitty gritty political or economically serious, and even technically or ideologically serious. I don't even care if the game violates my world view. Just give me something to think about when I drop the controller and rejoin the real world. Until that happens, I will spend most of my time in literature because a good author will do more to challenge me than the typical mass media title (regardless of the media).
Somehow I can't help but feel this money would have been better allocated to a game developer instead of a defense contractor.
Nope, many employees at game development studios won't pass the piss test.
That is not a joke. That is reality. More than one non-gaming corporation that diversified into gaming was asked if the bought the game studio for the brand name or the talented people. If the later then they were advised not to bring certain aspects of their corporate policy to the game studio, in particular the piss test. It was explained that they would end up firing much of the value behind their investment.
Besides, what makes you think defense contractors lack genuine game developers. You may have heard all those stories from former developers who complain of companies taking advantage of naive college grads who think game development must be the coolest thing there is and work long hours for low pay and no overtime. Some of these move on to defense contractors.
To be clear, these games are meant to diminish people's cognitive biases:
Which seems dubious to me, because the type of people who would get selected for sensitive government work by Human Resource Management types, are the same type of people who hold conservative and rigid views of thinking. Let's face it, if these games made somebody think that maybe having marijuana use criminalized is a bad policy decision, or that it may be detrimental to society to teach abstinence (anti-sex) education to children; then Raytheon would lose their government contracts and licenses to do business in the United States.
Trying to get rid of people's prejudices and biases is a noble idea, but having this as a U.S. GOVERNMENT exercise is as practical as trying to get rid of a Leopard's spots or trying to convert the Pope to Islam. It just aint gonna happen.
References:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/raytheon-gets-105m-develop-serious-games
"Serious games" is a term open for laughing at - but they are used for training in a lot of domains. Another term might be "simulation" and if you start thinking in those terms you're into pilots learning to fly 747's, air traffic controllers managing crisis situations without anybody actually dying, doctors practicing surgery, and so on. These are all out there. I think the game vs. simulation definition might boil down to a simulation with a win scenario, in which case you can bring in the military using variants of Doom and other shooters to train soldiers in team work, financial traders playing sims that improve their trading behaviour, and so forth.
In all the above, if you take data from the player, either by a sensor measuring heart rate, or just by the style of their game play, it's theorised that you can deduce emotion /cognitive biases and help people improve upon these, either by playing games in a diagnostic mode and then giving them feedback or live feedback in a didactic mode.
Currently I am working on EU project which is investigating (amongst other things) whether serious games can be used to overcome emotion bias in financial investors: http://www.xdelia.org/
This is just another money hole. Code aaaaaand flush.
And Raytheon gave $5.5M Blizzard for developing "Serious Games".
twitter.com/ismetozozturk
Carmen San Diego anyone?
Jim
because , as far as our government is concerned, the drone program doesnt even exist?
or are you dealing in CLASSIFIED material here? oh, then, expect a knock from the FBI to take you away any day now
gimmicks, it should be spending it on something that provides actual value to someone, somewhere, hopefully that the private economy isn't producing. it would be like if the government decided to start manufacturing bottled water. 1. nobody needs any more bottled water, the shelves are overflowing with it 2. its a pointless, idiotic product in the first place, and 3. its a complete waste of taxpayer dollars. wasting money is not the same thing as stimulating the economy.
in iraq, in afghanistan, in the BP oil spill, in Katrina, in the Texas refinery explosions, in the West Virginia coal mine explosion, ... i can see "useful" and "saving lives" right around the corner with all this "training" and "education" we give "the warfighter" and our "men and women in uniform".
a certain ideology or a certain model of the world that may or may not actually resemble reality.
if the '21st century' wants to abandon the '19th century' notions like, say, empiricism, and the scientific method, (which actually go back hundreds of years BC) then i think the 21st century may be the last century.
look at all these people whose livelihoods depends on the defense-industrial-natl'security complex.
do you expect any of them to have a reasonable, disinterested attitude when it comes to analyzing this question?
when such a large percentage of society is corrupted by the corrupt system, then real change becomes very difficult. the body of people receiving the largesse of the greed and corruption (the nomenklatura) will continue to support it, regardless of all evidence and facts, while the people suffering under it will continue to get ridiculed and called morons. (or, if they attempt to exercise their constitutional rights to free association and speech, be beaten and gassed and shot in the head with teargas canisters)
Unless it is a radar or a missile, Raytheon couldn't find its a** with both hands - especially regarding software (yes, I have experience dealing with them, know people they have hired to run software projects for them, et cetera...)
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I'm glad to see the money go to that stalwart of games innovation... Ratheon? The missile people?
of course when the government wants to burn money, it dumps it into the military industrial complex.
There are dozens of companies more qualified.
They're using their grammar skills there.
This was done already in the past - it's a game called Carmen Sandiego! Think about, "International Detective theme" just says it all!
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
Why is this going to foreign-intel-target Raytheon and not to an under-the-table-paid casual gaming studio spinoff/black team? Think Raytheon is subcontracting this?
nt
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
"hidden objects in picture" game.
Serious people like me like serious games.
--
Sam
Um... the linked blog post links to an official document that was first posted in March of this year.
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