 Now We're Getting Somewhere
Reflections On The Serious Games Summit 2004
By Tim Carter (26 October 2004)
That term "game" is such a double-edged sword
(as I have written elsewhere). On the one hand implying fun and
lightness, on the other a term elemental in nature - it best describes what it describes.
The first, dedicated Serious Games Summit - which I attended in
Washington last week - would have been misnamed if it were the
"Simulation Summit" or something similar. Nevertheless, there is a
newfound openness to the idea - floating around the halls of the
Loews L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington DC - that fun leads to faster "knowledge
transference" (a jargon term if ever I heard one); and that what
has been learned in the entertainment world can lead to more
effective (and less expensive) learning in real world fields
of education, military, medicine, et cetera.
Of course there was also a hint of recognition that the
entertainment-based game designers learned from the military as well
(if you have to search far back to know this).
The opening key note speaker was Jim Dunnigan - whose material I
have studied in my own wargame design, and whose games I've
had a lot of fun playing. Jim Dunnigan, before there
were "microcomputers", was designing wargames just for the hell of
it, and followed this into a career designing them for the real
military, and eventually consulting and writing on military and
business topics. It was refreshing to hear him, in his sharp New
York accent, cutting right to what I consider
the meat of the topic: what you really need to get games right. A
felt a huge "I told yah so" welling up in my gut, which of course
needed to remain unspoken.
There followed a blizzard of panels, lectures, roundtables -
and of course lots of networking. (Not that I'm the best networker
- aside from my shyness I have these piercing almost black eyes
that seem to
put people off just when I'm trying to introduce myself.) I met
lots of people from lots of organizations - almost all American - who were receptive to the
aforementioned mantra: games are good; let's use them to teach,
train and promote; and so what if they also happen to be fun.
In fact the idea was floating around there - oft repeated - that
the very fact games are fun is what makes them so effective at
teaching, training and communicating ideas.
From what I could tell, at least half (and possibly two-thirds)
of the parties there were not game developers. Rather they were
from government, non-profit organizations and private industry, there to see what
games can do for them. There were educators and military, of
course, but there were also corporate trainers, non-profits and
other groups with more esoteric ideas for using games.
The America's Army team was there in droves, and the
Monday night gala was a standup cocktail affair with the ambience
of first-person video game combat wafting around. Using a replica
of a Marine sharpshooter's rifle I rode shotgun through the
streets of some nameless Middle Eastern city displayed on a huge
120 degree screen, guarding a convoy from ambush, while a
compatriot backed me up and a third took the steering wheel. We heard
that the US Air
Force, Navy and Marines are all wondering what the hell this
America's Army thing is and why they don't have a piece of
that action. There was even a tiny contingent from the Canadian
military, no doubt interested by all the fuss over this game as
well. (Though by and large I didn't smell from the Canadians
anywhere near the kind of desire to move on this the Americans
uniformly had.)
Speaking of Canadians, the only others I met were Warren
Currell (of Sherpa Games here in Toronto), a Canadian Army press
team (in their CADPAT combat fatigues - which we must show off to
the
Americans every time we can), and a CBC radio reporter.
It was nice to attend a wargame roundtable and talk turkey.
There were the hardcore simulation types with this overwhelming
desire to reduce the whole issue to mechanistic analysis. You can
reduce a "game" to a simulation, was an argument they had (another
thing buzzing around is the tension of debate over the difference
between a game and a simulation), though there
was an underlying weakness to this rationale I couldn't help but
comment on. I brought out the old Murphy's Laws of Combat saying:
"Professionals are predictable but the world is full of amateurs"
- just to make a point why we still need creative thinkers
involved in military gaming (or simulation) as well. It was refreshing to hear
somebody from Booz Allen Hamilton (a big American strategy
consulting firm) readily agree with me. (Talking to him later he mused,
"How else could you know box cutters could be used to take over an
aircraft?") Sometimes the most important things are deceptively
simple - so analytical thought is fine we all know, but creative
insight is important as well (overlooked though it is).
There were, of course, long sessions on non-military games and
applications. The issue of games in the corporate training field
was touched on, and there was one conclusion that stuck with
me: corporations won't buy into games for training unless they can
see ways it will improve the bottom line, with validated metrics.
(One presenter had successfully applied them to an insurance company - which
was fortunate because it was a type of industry where everything
gets measured, and he was able to show tangible results in terms
of reduced training costs.)
There was material on games in the learning environment. Here a
problem lingers in terms of assessing the results of games. (It
was a problem we had in designing JA Toronto's version of Banks
In Action - the students learn, but how do you validate it:
give them a test afterwards I suppose?) I also viewed a session by
Kurt Squire on using Sid Meier's Civilization III in the
classroom. My experience in running games in classrooms piqued my
interest and made me think something more might be afoot - but
apparently not. It's sad people today have such a hard time thinking outside the
computer/console box when it comes to games. But I guess if it is
audio-visual that makes it somehow "legit" - that prejudice that
if it runs on a high-tech computer it is somehow "better" than if
it needs to be played manually on a tabletop. (The fact Sid Meier himself respected
tabletop game designers so much might give them pause for thought.
Might...) I wondered why they didn't just bring in copies of the
original Avalon Hill boardgame Civilization: I mean if
you're open to the idea that a fun game can teach, then there you
go! As we game designers know - a game is a game is a game,
whether it runs on a computer, an XBox, or on your tabletop with
off-the-top-of-your-head arithmetic. Certainly it would be a less expensive
means to run the game; plus you can put five or six students
through the experience without the expense of buying and
maintaining a bunch of computers. (Either that or integrate
the computer game into a more intensive non-computer curriculum.)
But that's just me, I guess...
Organizations were there to use games to promote their
industries as well. My subject-orientation in game design made me
quite eager to work with those folks: there's nothing quite as
interesting as the challenge of translating real world work and
industry into the language of a game - to find the dominant
strategies; research the key decision points; determine the most
effective perspective, time scale, et cetera. It's a challenge
that's much harder from a functional game design perspective than,
say, making a new first person shooter. I mean, you are leaping
into the pure unknown, with no forbears to steal - erm... copy
from. So, hey, I left my
business card and cannot wait to make my pitch for their RFPs.
But honestly, my favourite moments were during
the keynotes - Jim Dunnigan at the beginning and Dr Johnny Wilson
at the end. Both were longtime gamers from a period before games
were such a hot buzzword. Dr Wilson took us through a journey of
old-style boardgames and computer games - and it reminded me of a time when games were fresh and
alive; not hampered by entrenched methodologies, technologies and
their residual thinking. His discussion of Diplomacy, for
example, hinted at the highest potential for games: their ability
to allow us to reflect on ourselves and gain insight into the way the
world works. In both cases, I felt something I hadn't throughout
the rest of it - a tingly sensation; a feeling I get when buzzing
on a creative edge: working on a project, playing an awesome game,
or something like that. I felt awake and aware as I heard these
old time professionals confirming all of my "theories" and
hypotheses about what games really mean: that they go beyond mere
technology, for one thing. Meeting Jim Dunnigan afterwards, I told
him how, in Grade 9, I had played Jutland (the
first game he published, in 1967). During exam week all the desks
were moved out of our open concept high school into the gymnasium.
I had only one exam to write. So my friend and I commandeered an
empty classroom with a beautiful blue carpet, and for four solid
school days
in a row it became the
North Sea in the Great War as we played Jutland - the
entire British and German fleets sprawled out across the floor. It was one of those "game moments" (as I
call them) that will stick with me forever. Jim told the audience
in his keynote you have to find those guys who are, in
particular, manual game designers; who are obsessed with taking a
game or a process apart and figuring out how it works on the
inside. Those are the guys who will do the new things; who will make you a lot of money.
To hear this validation of the kind of work I do - out in the open
to the people who matter - gave me hope that pure functional game design may finally have its full
importance recognized. That there is a whole rich dimension to game development
beyond
programming and graphics waiting to be seen. It was especially inspiring.
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