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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."
You know, that's a pretty small budget for a modern AAA game, seeing how this is a government contract it'll probably be based on the old Infocomm text game engine.
HA! catchpa: derision
I've never heard of Raythorn BBN Technologies and I bet you haven't either. So here.
you would have lost the bet. BBN is pretty well known for networking related developments (first packet switch/router, first machine-to-machine messaging/email) and acoustic developments (UN Assembly Hall, forensic analysis of the JFK dictabelt & the Nixon Tapes, `Boomerang').
In fact, your computer probably has a fair bit of BBN code & configuration in it. Grep for 'BBN' in /etc, see what comes up.
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.
In Pakistan, the drones have killed 2000 militants and 138 civilians.
That is a fucking phenomenal record. There is no valid argument to be made about whether or not drones work well and minimize civilian casualties, the only argument is whether the US should be in Pakistan at all.
I am surprised 138 of the killed were classified as civilians. I would expected everyone killed to have been named as a terrorist (afterall no one can really prove someone is not a terrorist)
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.
"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/