Small industry, big plans

'Gamer generation'
Facing a potential brain drain may require radical thinking from conservative companies. A new wave of freshly minted college grads, a demographic that was literally raised on video games, will revolutionize the way workplaces operate, predicts Byron Reeves, a professor at Stanford University and a proponent of game-based learning in the corporate sector.

For this “gamer generation,” competition is fun and familiar, trial and error is a learning strategy and risk is understood as being necessary for success.

“The expectations that are being developed in games are the same ones that this generation will bring to work,” he adds.

It doesn’t hurt that serious games are cost-effective — at least when compared to their entertainment-game cousins. “Incident Commander” cost a mere $1 million to develop — far less than a “Madden” or a “Final Fantasy.” That’s mainly because the underlying technology of many serious games is the same technology that powers entertainment games. No need, in other words, to reinvent the wheel.

There’s a whole community of gamers in the entertainment space that like to modify existing games with customized content. These so-called “mod-makers” might add new characters, new textures, new levels and even new storylines to a commercial game like “DOOM” or “Half-Life.”

Existing — and inexpensive — tech
In some cases, these “mods” create a whole new game on the back of an existing one. Holt and several other modders developed “Day of Defeat,” a World War II game, using Valve Software’s Half-Life Source engine.

Holt used that same know-how when building his forest simulator, which marries massive amounts of forest data from Oregon, Washington and California with Garage Games’ Torque Game Builder, an engine that powers several popular casual games.

“Making a mod can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be,” says Holt. A small change, like altering the sounds of gunfire, can be quite easy. A total conversion, as it’s called in the mod community, is something else altogether. For that, Holt says, you’ll need software development skills, 3D model-editing abilities, and 2D art-creation chops.

But not all of that is necessary in serious games.

“Lightweight changes to a game engine can have a huge impact,” says Holt. “Too many people get caught up in trying to make something really realistic, when the truth is, they need to concentrate on whether they can accurately simulate [a specific] environment.”

But no matter how cheap, easy-to-make and innovative serious games are, they share one critical must-have with entertainment games: they’ve gotta be fun. Or at least, fun enough so that the player will not only be entertained – but engaged.

“A serious game needs to keep its feet firmly planted in two worlds,” says Nick deKanter, co-founder of Muzzy Lane Software, which makes the World War II strategy game “Making History.” “The game must have one foot in the education world, with the right ties into the teaching objectives,” he says. “But the other foot is in gameplay.”

Good gameplay in a serious game, says W. Lewis Johnson, project lead on “Tactical Iraqi” and the chief executive of Tactical Language Training, is one that’s not only engaging, but rewarding. “That is what keeps learners working hard.”

In fact, many who’ve played “Tactical Iraqi” have remarked that they can’t wait to play it again, he says.

Ever said that about a textbook?

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