|
The Monday
afternoon session featured Sherpa Games founder and president Warren Currell
moderating a panel of three: Dean Ku, the vice president of marketing
for dance pad manufacturer RedOctane; Ubisoft Director of New Business
Management James Regan; and Roger Arias, from Destineer Studios. The format
was question and answer with Currell directing a series of three questions
to his panel regarding Serious Games and the consumer market. With those
questions expended, an audience Q&A session would begin. His first
two questions were as follows:
Question
One: Under what pretenses is the Serious Games sector providing
inspiration, talent, or technology back to the commercial games industry?
Question
Two: Can it ever become pervasive enough to forge stronger
links between publishers and Serious Game projects or studios?
As the panel
progressed, the panelists' responses tended to blur from one question
to the next, forming more a set of themes rather than specific answers.
To the first question, for instance, James Regan replied that UbiSoft
was busy porting the America's Army game to consoles. Regan
and Arias then explained in detail how consulting "subject matter experts"
helps to add realism to a game. To the second question, they suggested
that having good relations with the Army will result in the Army "speaking
well of you" to others. Over the first two questions, Regan observed more
than once that it can be "tough to have one game work as both a trainer
and an entertainment device;" the solution he offered was to "tune" the
game: to add features and extra game modes, to make it more of a satisfying
commercial product. Even then, some games might be impossible sells. He
described an air traffic control game that was so detailed and accurate
that he couldn't fathom that anyone other than he or his father would
be interested in it.
As counterpoint,
Dean Ku spoke of his attempts to work with Washington-area schools on
the use of videogames in the classroom. Citing a study that suggested
a higher level of reading comprehension after fifteen minutes of exercise,
Ku described a game that combined his company's dance mats with reading.
In turn, Regan brought up a game that simulated the U.S. electoral process:
you choose two candidates, and you run them through the system. As Regan
described it, even if you knew nothing of how American politics worked
before you played the game, you had a pretty good sense of them when it
was over. He cited a number of schools interested in the program.
The final
question, Currell presaged with an explanation of what he dubbed the "Pandemic
Epidemic":
•
Most Serious Games projects are boring to the average gamer.
•
Full Spectrum Warrior is a great example of games created for
the Serious Games sector but also had commercial appeal.
•
The military paid Pandemic to make Full Spectrum Warrior .
•
Pandemic also published a commercial version through THQ.
•
Excellent method to attract world-class talent to the project.
•
Taxpayers were upset.
The issue
at hand was a St.
Petersburg Times article claiming that, in regard to Full Spectrum
Warrior, Pandemic cut corners, making a game that was useless as
a training tool so it would be more appealing to a commercial audience.
The audience offered groans and objections; it seemed many attendees were
familiar with the piece, and few agreed with it.
Question
Three: Given this recent reaction to the Full Spectrum
Warrior game, do you think that this will deter any future collaboration
between Serious Games and commercial games?
Arias explained
that, in the civilian sector, game developers "do stupid things" because
they're trained to think about what makes a videogame fun, rather than
what makes it accurate. He offered as an example a situation where a single
ground troop explores foreign terrain, using the tools at hand - the angle
of mountains, the position of the sun, GPS hardware - to determine his
position; he uses special goggles to draw the distance from his position
to a foreign object; he then can call for an air strike, using the coordinates
he has calculated. The impulse of the commercial designer, he said, is
to simplify a situation like this to make it more rewarding to play, not
even thinking that his design instincts might pose a problem. The solution
he offered is that Serious Game developers need better communication.
It is their responsibility to consult an expert whenever a question arises.
After the
presentation, one man from the audience explained that he had nothing
to do with the videogame industry or the army; he was in health insurance,
and had come to the conference in hopes of seeing a broader discussion
of Serious Games, and their utilities. He explained that the panel did
little to answer his questions. Someone explained to him that he should
have been around earlier; there was a great talk about medical technology
in the morning. "I guess I should have," he mumbled.
______________________________________________________
|
