Are Games Here to Stay?
LONGER-TERM FUNDAMENTALS ARE DRIVING THE WORLD OF COMMERCIAL GAMES INTO THE BROADER MS&T FIELD.
Walk the floor at this year’s I/ITSEC conference and you’re sure to see increasing evidence that games, either in name, technology or form, are an increasing factor in military modeling, simulation and training. As a result we must increasingly ask the question of whether the growing presence of games or “serious games” is in fact heading toward a permanent presence in the military MS&T community. Or is it a fad brought on by a few high profile projects and the media’s obsession with the irony of “kids” entertainment being turned into something more life and death then a Saturday afternoon game of Ratchet & Clank? The answer is yes, but perhaps not for the reasons that you might think. Understanding some of the more unique longer-term fundamentals that are driving the world of commercial games into the broader MS&T field offers a chance to not only agree with this assessment but to better prepare for the future.
1. GAMES ARE MOVING FORWARD DUE TO THE UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGY PROGRESSION NOT BECAUSE THEY ARE PROVEN TO TRAIN BETTER.
It is important to understand that the core push of games into the MS&T community is at its heart technologically based. This fact sometimes seems lost on the general discussion of whether the idea that games as a form of media are effective for training.
The fact is that desktop graphics, interface design and related development are pushing forward at an incredible speed because of the $30 billion global games business. Serious games are feeding off the byproduct of the tremendous amount of work and innovation that commercial game development is producing. This byproduct is predominantly agnostic to how it is used by other sectors outside of entertainment. It is simply supplying a baseline progression of faster, more capable visualization technologies, innovative interface design, better network utilization, authoring technology, social networking advancement and more.
As such the greater MS&T community is rapidly trying to reintegrate these technologies into existing development, design, visualization and learning methodologies. Where wires seem crossed is in the separate debate about whether learning in the guise of abstracted game-play (vs. exacting simulation or other more specific learning methodologies) or even in the form of generic 3-D worlds offers any stronger capability vs. other media. The use of the technology relevant to the parameters a project calls for and the use of a design methodology to solve a largerended goal are just not the same. When we confuse the two we do a disservice that results in under-appreciation of games providing a gamut of outcomes of which some are undoubtedly useful.
This being said we must do a better job communicating technological needs for the greater MS&T space back to the world of games, because sometimes the needs are different but not so different that we can’t articulate needs better. For example, many 3-D game engines are not realistically exacting with how geometry is positioned in the engine. Want to place a tree at a specific measurable point vs. its relative distance from another object and many game engines will fail to translate this. So what if a tree isn’t exactly where it is in a grand outdoor plaza in Half-Life?
However, if developers in gaming understood why it is better to have such exactitude in their engines they might do the work to accomplish such tasks. As the use of such cast-off technology increases we should be making the demands other customers would of any other source of technology. As a long-term trend expect the technologies that power modern day games to consistently increase in the years to come and for these technologies and accompanying design methods to form the basis of many more desktop and mobile applications. As the technology transfer increases with that will come the need for people skilled in using these technologies to build applications, and that means people who are closer in skill and heart to game design. The result? A technology driven form of cultural assimilation that infuses every aspect of the MS&T space with a tinge or more of gaming.
2. AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF SIMULATION DEVELOPERS IS NOW BEING RAISED ON GAMES.
Speaking of cultural assimilation... Often with games the notion of new generations is wrapped around the notion that games are a medium of youth and thus we must use games to reach young warfighters. This has always struck me as a strange notion especially today where there is still a big mix of aptitude and disparity relevant to games among 15-35 year olds. Games simply aren’t as pervasive and absolute to draw this conclusion as strongly as it is. However, where I do see such pervasiveness of game design and development is among college-age computer science, modeling, simulation, and 3-D graphics students. Among this group games are pervasive.
Appreciation for game properties are pervasive, and students readily interchange language from many domains with games. Ask the students to describe a simulation, and any extended conversation is littered with game speak (e.g. Level, player, mod, FPS, etc.) and design approaches. The current and next-generation of MS&T employees will simply not see any reason to have walls between game-centered ideas and other formal practices. Games are a formal practice to them.
The only question is how to properly combine games as a formal practice with anything else they are doing relevant to the problem they are asked to solve. Their strength will be to not have any sacred cows as well as being more intimately familiar with games as a media form to not make the mistake that literal use of game design will be an acceptable approach. It is this generational wave that we must be more cognizant of then, the users, because they will lead the charge to put applications in front of users that (hopefully) get the best results. How much they use or do not use anything game-related to do that design will be based on this generation’s ability to refocus on the problem presented to them vs. the silo’d debates about which methodology may be best.
3. GAMES ARE OFFERING NEW METHODS FOR SHARING KNOWLEDGE AND COMMUNICATING.
One of the most important aspects of games is the growing bidirectional nature of games as a medium. Games are decreasingly an experience where the game is a single playable experience as specifically dictated by the designer. Instead more and more games are offering robust authoring tools to their playing public. Many other games are now created as multiplayer experiences. Even if not multiplayer, many games are adding social networking experiences to their wares. For example, users who play SingStar, Sony’s hit karaoke game, frequently post videos to YouTube. As a result the next version of the game features an embedded YouTube social networking experience right in the product.
Be it modifiable frameworks, user-created content, multiplayer gaming, or social networks, games are creating a platform where players can speak to each other. Players can invent and share new experiences and use games to express themselves, promote content to each other, and in general engage in the debate over a particular piece of information. As more people on the planet become adept at authoring games (from scratch or as modifications of other systems) things will change. We will no longer just debate the underlying assumptions of a model or simulation. Instead we will rapidly iterate through such assumptions and look at the actual results. We will use games to purposely distort reality and then share that with the express purpose of hoping that reality comes about. In all these and other wild cases we will be sharing knowledge, forming community and communicating.
Games allow this because they democratize the idea of simulation.
They don’t make it the domain of people who like spreadsheets, or who can hire game-masters to role-play planned-out scenarios.
Increasingly games also are focused on allowing users to create and author within the fundamental simulation framework(s) of the game.
Games are the most digestible form of synthetic reality everyday people are exposed to and more so these experiences are become quite capable at allowing the same players to play and author their own unique experiences. We will soon see some of the best broadly-author capable work get released in the form of Will Wright’s next magnum opus, “Spore.” While there is considerable debate over whether Spore will be the same scope hit as his previous game, The Sims, there is little doubt already that its authoring systems are state-of-the-art and will open up the idea of simulation/ world authoring to a much wider audience.
4. GAMES ARE DEMOCRATIZING THE MENTAL MODEL OF SIMULATION.
One of the most important things modern day games offer is that they require players to interact with a simulation/model such that they fully understand it. This is true of any simulation, but games being often simpler in scope and independently entertaining bring this core idea of simulation to the masses. Games are often designed to increasingly reward the player who masters the simulation. To fully appreciate the simulation of football that is Madden ‘08 is to master it to the point you can beat it consistently (which itself is enjoyable).
The core of this premise holds true regardless of the veracity of the simulation. Many games abstract themselves from the underlying system that it simulates—sometimes to a great degree. Furthermore, many games are “simulating” something that is specifically fictional. As much as NASA roars ahead, most space games feature technologies and capabilities in their spacecraft we have yet to invent. Yet the players of EVE Online certainly see themselves as playing in “realistic” simulated epic of space ship warfare. Game designers excel at fictional simulation. In all of these cases what games are doing is introducing players to the basic mental model of simulation in a quite democratized form. By doing this, games teach their player’s to begin to see the world and its many systems and structures as distinct models that they can break down into components and reassemble into new forms.
This is what education researchers such as Jim Gee refer to as a new style of systems literacy. If we’re to believe this is true, then what we must realize is that games provide the widest, most accessible means to train large swaths of people to see the complexity of the world as entirely de-constructible and understandable, and better yet, systems are solvable puzzles. There is little argument the world is becoming more complex and intertwined. Without the ability to observe, assess and understand things as components of a system and see the often recursive nature of such systems we will fall behind. This idea places games as the first step in appreciation for all forms of modeling and simulation.
Yet games also have their own unique properties that have explicit strengths (for example, they are more forgiving then some simulations, and they often eschew accuracy in favor of accessibility). Games also have optimized forms of interface for various types of simulation. For example, the WASD keys on a keyboard are considered the defacto-optimal setup for navigating with a mouse through a 3-D space. Taken together this means that we should expect people raised on games as a form of simulation to carry forward a deeper appreciation for games as a form of simulation. They will not discard game-based approaches, media conventions, and interfaces simply because we ask them to, if in their eyes there is usefulness in them later on in life.
The most useful of these conventions will actually be the try, assess, adapt, try again iterative method of play. Going forward any simulation that doesn’t enable easy flow through this play process will be held in disdain. Not because it breaks some pedagogical expectation either—simply because it is seen as purely poor software design.
GAME DNA
Essentially games are here to stay because at the fundamental production level of technology and talent we are assimilating is increasingly orientated from the world of games. The largest cache of talent in modeling and simulation not already allocated to a demand that already outstrips supply is in the games industry. There may be a choice (let alone a debate) about using games, but there should be little debate about using game-focused talent, for there will be little choice or separation of this talent going forward. Games are also here to stay because they are the form of modeling and simulation more people are routinely exposed to.
Given the Darwinian nature of the games business and the massive amount of product rapidly shipped to audiences and increasingly complex feedback loops, the fact is games are evolving faster and optimizing themselves faster then other forms of interactive media. As a result the audience members (young and old) are going to bring forward the traits from games as a form of modeling and simulation they hold to higher standards then what they are encountering otherwise. Producers will be required to respond, and to do that they will need talent that understands and respects this requirement.
Those two strands of game-DNA are attempting to marry in an environment beyond entertainment where the requirements are different then getting 1 million sales by the end of the holiday season. This creates the friction that exists between those advocating games who view games as hosting superior resources in part or whole from other tools in the MS&T toolbox. That includes most of all the “spit and polish” to interface and production that many games feature. Eventually these forces have to be wholly accommodated, and ultimately the separation of games, modeling, simulation and learning software will eventually just melt away. In its place will be the resulting hybrid. A world where we create highly capable applications that make no visible distinction between games, work, simulation or learning. A world where the debate over the exact shape and verisimilitude of an application will be nothing more then a blip in the pre-production/design phase. This is a world where the skills we learn in games as players and developers simply blend into the interfaces, authoring modalities and literacy needed to learn, practice and work. This is why games are here to stay: They are already a part of the new DNA of next-generation modeling, simulation and training. ♦