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US Gives Raytheon $10.5M For 'Serious Games'

Posted by Soulskill on from the recruit-from-wow-raids dept.

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."

5 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. In the middle of the greatest deficit... by tryptogryphic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...it's good to see our government spending money on games.

    1. Re:In the middle of the greatest deficit... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

  2. So... by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 5, Funny

    They just spent $10.5 million to remake Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

  3. No sex scenes then? by codeAlDente · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:Link by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've never heard of Raythorn BBN Technologies and I bet you haven't either.

    Bolt, Beranek and Newman basically built the first generation of the internet.
    Raytheon is the single largest private employer in the state of Massachusetts.
    Apparently Raytheon purchased BBN - although for a while during the dotcom crazy they were called Genuity.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.