Serious Games Summit D.C. by Sande Chen

The Serious Games Summit had a feel of slapdash haphazardness, even though CMP (who hosts the annual Game Developers Conference) was involved. For example, the schedule of the conference remained a mystery until the last minute - even though the website said 'Check back in early August' since before midsummer. There was a sense that maybe there just weren't a lot of speakers coming to this. Still, I had a lot of high hopes for this conference. The Serious Games Summit at GDC last year had been well attended and I know for a fact that a number of game developers benefited and landed contracts. The development cycle is short, or at least shorter, for serious games, so it seemed reasonable that some of those developers would be there to present their findings to the community. There was a sense of optimism, a feeling that we are breaking down the doors to a grand new possible market. Rake the dough in, baby!

To start things off, though, the schedule provided in the conference material was pretty much useless. First, you had to go through the alphabetical index and note the rooms and tracks (there weren't any tracks, really- maybe because military was so much of the focus, but ah, wouldn't it have been nice if there had been tracks with names like For People Who Don't Know Anything About the Game Industry, or Anything Not To Do With the Military, and maybe even Self-Indulgent Case Studies …). I definitely didn't want to attend stuff like "what is a mod", or "how a game developer studio is really run".

For example, as I sat in a roundtable (more like a "call-out") of 50 -70 people, eager to learn about funding possibilities, I found I was in a room of people who also wanted to learn and didn't have much to tell me that I didn't already know. All the people who had the info didn't need to go to this roundtable and they were probably going to some other more interesting session instead of altruistically sharing with us. And where were the government people? Most of the people I met were game developers.

As press, I didn't meet other game press. Where were you guys hiding? Was it because there was no Press Room? No place for us type out up-to-the-minute reports and check our e-mail? I saw evidence that the mainstream press was interested. The Washington Post had the Serious Games Summit on the front page! Later on in the week, though, they had an article on Erotic Games and sex sims… Maybe next year, we can have a S&M Game Summit!

I came to the conference because I wanted to know facts. I wanted statistics. I wanted proof about serious games and their potential. I was hungry for learning. Poking around the Serious Games site (http://www.seriousgames.org) site, I learn that Ben Sawyer of consulting firm Digital Mill estimates market size or potential market size for Serious Games to be around 20 million. But his methodology seems a little dodgy - some kind of explanation that the budgets vary, but 1 mil might be a good average and he knows of 20-60 projects going on. First of all, as the conference keynote speakers noted, Serious Games isn't a new thing. Walking around the exhibitor booths, I learned that some companies have been around since the mid-1990s. Good or bad, there's e-learning, judgmental software for law enforcement, and military training sims. These markets already exist. While these people may not have had the Serious Games Summit before, they had their own trade magazines and conferences. Rather, I find out from Ben Sawyer in an interview wedged between Newsday and a call-in radio interview, Serious Games is an ideal. According to Ben, if we could take what's fun about the game industry and merge our knowledge of game design into e-learning, why, we could take over this market. No more boring edutainment games!

What I was yearning to know was what the size of the current market for Serious Games-type stuff was in sales. Yeah, it's great to know about budgets as a game developer. But apples and oranges, that's a lot like saying the market for a film is 100 million just because the budget is 10 million and I know of 10 films currently in production. Even if my budget for a film is 10 million, I'm going to go out and use marketing to sell tickets and hopefully, the box office exceeds 10 million.

And it's true there are some lame-ass boring edutainment products. Serious Games is such a tag word that even a low-end food-matching game is a "game." You can see why the game industry has traditionally looked down upon and distanced itself from edutainment. It was education without much understanding of entertainment. By calling itself edutainment, this industry was stressing education and trying not to connotate "game," which educators might have viewed as "wasteless timesuck." Other more serious companies in this market also distanced themselves from the game industry. They made "simulations" not "games."

The government (beyond the military) is learning from the success of America's Army that games may have a place in the training. Before, they might have veered away squeamishly, "Games? Eek," but now they fully embrace games as a powerful training tool. They may even view games as a "too powerful," an ultimate panacea to training.

The military already evaluates COTS or Commercial Off The Shelf products for its own uses. It's way cheaper and faster to have a lot of soldiers go through a virtual training program than to have them all go through physical training with weapons.

Here's some data of interest. In data from previous wars, the death rates of pilots were correlated with raiding runs. As a pilot made more excursions, he was less likely to die. The first run was when the pilot had the most chance of getting killed off. So, veterans of skirmishes were more seasoned and knew how to survive. Makes sense. But what if we could make them all "virtual veterans"? Wouldn't they be better prepared? We've all heard the stories of some guy that learned to pilot from Flight Simulator.

Here's where mainstream games differ from Serious Games. For the sake of fun, game developers often simplify things. Would you want to aim at a target and miss? That's what might happen if we stuck in Newtonian physics in our space epics. Would you want to go through all the safety protocols and all the buttons on a real space shuttle dashboard? Software developers know about critical software. That's where if you mess up your programming, somebody might Die because the rollercoaster flew off the track or the heart-lung machine miscalculated. Is that serious enough for you? Take it seriously.

Even if it's not critical like for military uses, it's serious enough that the company might get sued because the game it used to illustrate sexual harassment policies instead of the regular corporate training film was a laughfest that failed to teach anything. The attendees probably immediately sexually harassed every NPC in the game because that choice was more entertaining than the dull answer that everybody knew was the correct corporate answer. And just because they finally ended up with the correct corporate answer at the end, is it because they learned anything or they were bored enough to look at the other content?

I think that game developers, especially independent game developers, should view Serious Games as a potential market, but should know what they're stepping into. Research your niche market carefully. What are other companies doing? Can you improve it? What can you learn about this business? If you're in the game industry for entertainment, then you should think of Serious Games as a separate business because there are different models for funding and different timelines. Bigger companies who already have big publishers in their back pockets probably don't need to care. After all, the game industry does make a lot of money.

If you want to see the presentations or notes of the actual conference, more info is up at the Serious Games Wiki at: http://www.seriousgames.org/wiki/index.php?page=SeriousGamesSummit

Photos

Col. Casey Wardynski

Ben Sawyer

DavidRM trying out some of the guns for America's Army