Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

A 'Serious' Growth Area For Game Developers? 56

Posted by Zonk from the fight-the-fight dept.
simoniker writes "The recently launched Serious Games Source website, which deals with games created for training, health, government, military, and educational uses, has an interview with the Serious Game Initiative's Ben Sawyer, in which the non-profit director, looking back at E3, comments controversially: 'I believe that every company in the games space will have a serious games related business position in the next ten years.' Sawyer especially referenced Square Enix's recent announcement that it has created a subsidiary to 'develop and distribute edutainment style software'. How many of our traditional education and training courses will be taken over by games over the next few years?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

A 'Serious' Growth Area For Game Developers? More

A 'Serious' Growth Area For Game Developers?

Comments Filter:

  • Not new, 8 bit computer had great educational (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gbrandt ( 113294 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @03:09PM (#15430373)
    Back in the day....

    Selling those 8 bit Commodores, "back in the day", the educational software market was huge...MAvis Beacon, Carmen Sandiego. Most adults bought the machine for their kids and the first software purchase was for education...then games. It wasn't until the later 8 bit years nearing the 16 bit years that games took off bigger than educational software.

    Gregor
  • Better get that checked out...

  • Maybe someday... (Score:5, Funny)

    by HolyCrapSCOsux ( 700114 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @03:14PM (#15430417)
    When long division becomes as fun as slapping hookers, stealing cars, and mowing down hordes of aliens with a chaingun....

  • A Far Cry. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @03:16PM (#15430436)
    Like the use for Farcry for geovisualization [rmit.edu.au]*

    *I have plenty more were that came from for anyone interested.

  • how many? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Surt ( 22457 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @03:16PM (#15430437) Homepage Journal
    "How many of our traditional education and training courses will be taken over by games over the next few years?"

    All of them. I'm particularly looking forward to playing Super Quantum Chromodynamics Brothers II, Welfare Fraud Investigator Deluxe, and Tom Clancy's: State Farm Policy Insurance Ghost Writer.
    • Welfare fraud investigator? sounds riviting! Maybe we can all collaborate to capture those fraudulent in real life! Our we could raid the city I live in for it *ducks*
      • Welfare fraud investigator? sounds riviting! Maybe we can all collaborate to capture those fraudulent in real life! Our we could raid the city I live in for it *ducks*

        Nice MMORPG... Massively Multiplayer Offline Ripoff Protection Game?
      • Heh you ever play "Perry Mason, the case of the mandarin murder" on the C64? Mile a minute action!
    • Tom Clancy's: State Farm Policy Insurance Ghost Writer.

      You know that Tom Clancy used to be in the insurance business, right? Yeah. He's not from the military or the intelligence community.

  • I think there was a /. article [slashdot.org] a few months back that talked a bit about the increasing use of combat simulators in military training programs. What software developer wouldn't want to tap into the [infinitely deep] pockets of the government?

  • Virtual Heroes (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Virtual Heroes, the development house behind Americas Army, is working on several pretty neat titles. I don't know how much I can talk about these, since I toured their development studios - but they're working on a collaborative team-based puzzle space game, where teams are provided a problem and have to work out a solution (think Apollo 13). They're also working on nurse and emergency responder simulation training games - editing a game to include new basic emergency responder techniques is easier and fa

  • What about the classic (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @03:58PM (#15430770) Homepage Journal
    Flight Simulator?
    I would like to see more open ended games that didn't involve killing people or being a criminal.
  • The time is ripe to pitch these blockbuster web-app edutainment titles:

    The Matrix: Excess XSS

    and

    The Matrix SQL: Injected

    ...pending franchise approval, of course.

    (The Brothers Wack' have already covered buffer overruns.)
    • xmtrx.GeekPoints--;

      I'm pretty sure a Matrix hacking game would concentrate on buffer overflows [securityfocus.com].
      • First of all, how dare you objectify me with such a blatant attempt to violate my member variable. It was declared *private* for a reason! In the future, should you wish to avoid hard-lockdown and debuggery, kindly invoke the appropriate accessor method, passing the quantity of points you wish to deduct and your credential object for authentication, authorization and auditing purposes.

        Secondly, I covered the buffer overflow issue in the last line of my original post.

        New franchise! Sp
    • Morpheus: "Neo, you forgot to escape input you received from the user. You know what that means?"
      Neo: "No, Morpheus."
      Morpheus: "It means everyone who does business with the Bank of Zion is about to get their identity hijacked and the next time you get together with Trinity she will actually be a 40 year old Russian Man."
      Neo: "Whoa."
  • Here's more information, a Wired article about how 3DO is going to revolutionize the game industry... by destroying it to make way for "edutainment." [wired.com]

    Oooh, it has "interactive movies" too... I'm actually salivating, "play an interactive movie: help create characters, shift the story line, change the situation, watch something different happen each time - cable in the VCR and edit your home videos." I'm sure that's going to beat the heck out of playing games! (Note, article is from May/Jun 1993 and titled "

  • Serious Games Source has just been acquired by Internet giant Yahoo.

    The relaunched site, Yahoo Serious Games Source, is now in beta testing in Australia.

  • Gram's Stain or Die. Serial Dilution to 10^9 and Get the Power-Up! Streak Plating Gone Wild! Name That Pathogen!

  • Social Skills Building Games (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @05:00PM (#15431129) Homepage
    I'd really love to see some development in games dealing with building social skills. That may seem like an oxymoron but there's really something to be said for learning skills in an environment that does not induce the full amount of stress that the real world situation does.

    I think dating sims are a great start to this, but they are all fantasy based, very unrealistic etc. I'd love to see a video game that uses real life video of people to train you to better read facial expressions and body language as well as to learn good responses to situations that may cause social anxiety.

    If anybody can think of any currently existing titles that are good for this, by all means please post them.

    And for you smartasses who are going to answer "I got a game for you, its called Real Life"....my response to you is that as someone with Social Anxiety Disorder, it isn't always as simple as "oh, I'm nervous around people so I'll go talk to as many as I can to try to get over this". Often times there is a specific underlying fear of the social interaction itself (or many fears) that need to be worked on before someone is able to test their skills out on a real person. I honestly think that the one person qualified to make such a game would be David DeAngelo. Some of his stuff may be fluff and an attempt at pushing more product, but at his core, he knows his shit and he speaks the brutal truth about interaction with the opposite sex.

    • I think this is quite frankly impossible. Humans do not behave in the way they are supposed to. Learning how to relate to people is not about learning how to behave, or how to respond, to a fixed set of stimuli. Everyone is different and many (most!) people cross-signal constantly. There is no way to learn to interact other than interacting.

      I think a computer program would do more harm than good by giving you a false sense of proficiency.

      • I think a computer program would do more harm than good by giving you a false sense of proficiency.

        Even with a false sense of proficiency, you would at least have confidence. I've studied improvisational acting quite a bit, so if I press myself, I can usually fake confidence. When you seem confident, even with no real social skill, things do tend to go more smoothly. I still hate most social settings, especially if there are lots of people around, but a tool to help build up confidence at basic social in

        • (How the hell do the 90%+ of people who learn 'appropriate' eye contact actually learn it? It doesn't seem to be an inherent thing, because different cultures have different norms for eye contact, but it's something that is basically never taught! If I could get training on normal eye contact, I think it'd help quite a bit...)

          I hate to break this to you but outside of finishing school, none of it is ever taught. And, although I don't (to my knowledge) have any related disorders, when I'm in awkward so

    • Actually, most online multiplayer RPGs (or "MMORPGs") are good for this in my experiences, particularly ones that reward interaction but that don't necessarily require it. I found that playing online text games (MUDs) back in college actually helped me get at ease with socialization in a non-threatening environment. If I made a serious faux pas, I didn't have someone angry or upset right in my face flustering me. I also learned how to communicate with people and learn how words that had one meaning for m
    • I think dating sims are a great start to this, but they are all fantasy based, very unrealistic etc. I'd love to see a video game that uses real life video of people to train you to better read facial expressions and body language as well as to learn good responses to situations that may cause social anxiety.

      If anybody can think of any currently existing titles that are good for this, by all means please post them.

      Hmmm. How about the Sims 2? Specifically, the Hot Date, University, and Nightlife expansions
    • I'd really love to see some development in games dealing with building social skills. That may seem like an oxymoron but there's really something to be said for learning skills in an environment that does not induce the full amount of stress that the real world situation does.

      90% of learning skills is dealing with the stress of the real world environment.

  • Warning: "serious" is overloaded in this context.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @06:00PM (#15431457) Homepage Journal

    Warning: "serious" is overloaded in this context:
    "serious games"

    Found 2 possible classes:

    "Serious::Game" in namespace "Croteam"
    "Serious::Game" in namespace "adjective"

    Didn't anybody else think <voice="Serious Sam">"Cool - Croateam are doing more Serious games - let's get our Serious Bombs and go kick some serious ass!"</voice>
  • "Serious Games Source", huh? And they don't have Serious Sam? Doesn't sound very serious...

    *hesitates to click the Post Anonymously button*

  • Atom smasher- a physically realistic simulation of what happens when you take one particle and fire it at another at a good fraction of the speed of light. They could leave out a lot of really obscure stuff that would probably be hard to simulate anyway, maybe just go to energy levels used in accelerators say from 30-50 years ago.

    Also add something like a virtual solar furnace/big bang that would allow you to start out with hydrogen and try to build increasingly heavier elements.

    Chemical construction kit-
  • I wish we had this [uncg.edu] in my Economics Department... Video games for college credit is possibly the best idea ever.

    If Civ counted for History credit, I'd probably have a PhD in it by now.
  • Would anyone really consider educational software that starts by butchering the language with an ugly marketing hybrid word like "edutainment"?

Slashdot Top Deals

For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

Close