Tag Archives: News & Updates

Virtual Hereos & Unreal

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The interview of Virtual Heroes by Serious Games Source yielded some good information about what VH planned on doing to further their “learning with video game” technology and in making a name for their company. They have developed an assessment component called “Advance Learning Technology” for use with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine (VH licensed the U3 as their in-house game development tool).

SGS: Why choose the Unreal Engine?

VH: Our team has worked extensively on the America’s Army game project. Because of this experience, we have seen the power of Unreal technology as it is used in the serious games space for strategic messaging and training and education applications. Many of our clients are asking for UE3 technology by name…

[So, AA was powered by Unreal? I am skeptical about the next sentense, how may education application out there are powered by Unreal? Honestly, I haven't heard of any. Name please?]

By leveraging COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) technologies, we can focus on challenges specific to serious games. These include the creation of instructor authoring tools, after-action-review technologies, the integration of biometrics and human physiology engines and SCORM compliance etc.

We feel that our arrangement with Epic provides us with a competitive advantage in the serious games market. This approach will enable us to creative premium immersive experiences which provide the means to train and educate while measuring task related skills-proficiency along the way.

SGS: Recently the engine has come under scrutiny over its complexity and alleged support issues. Does this concern your company in developing future serious games and other learning products?

VH: Not at all. We’ve been part of the Unreal Developer network since January 2004 when we began developing for the America’s Army game project. We chose UE3 in large part because of helpful support available from UDN.

[Ah! So Unreal was difficult to use and perhaps have many bugs. It appeared that UDN will handle all the problems related to Unreal engine.]

SGS: Can you give us some examples of the types of products that Virtual Heroes will look to develop using this technology?

VH: We will use UE3 for our Advanced Learning Technology (A.L.T.) platform. We are currently developing HumanSim for medical education and training. We are also developing Virtual Astronaut for STEM education and SIMWARS for Federal Systems training. We will be building applications to “open standards” established by the DoD like DIS/HLA, SCORM, OneSaf etc.

[The military is certainly driving SCORM. So any games that wish to make it into the military playground will have to be SCORM compliant, too. This has been proven in I/ITSEC.]

SGS: How with UE3 be integrated into the Advanced Learning Platform? How will this platform be bettered through this middleware?

VH: UE3 will enable us to accelerate the creation of the A.L.T. platform and focus on the mission-critical challenges for serious games related to instructor authoring, after-action-reviews, linkages to learning management systems, AI, SCORM.

[Finally, here's the meat! But somehow, I get the naggy feeling that they are trying to make ALT the name in serious games. (You know, Tylenol (instead of analgesic), BandAid (instead of plaster), and Advance Learning Technology (instead of serious games). Why? They refer to themselves as maker of serious games and/or advance learning technologies.

While they are the maker of Advanced Learning Technology (name of a software application), they are not maker of advance learning technologies. What are the advance learning technologies out there? Nothing... unless, you rename instructional technologies as learning technologies.... The "advanced" part is obviously pointing to digital games.]

Measuring Effectiveness Through Time

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Yet another Online Measuring Tool, this time by Microsoft. Yahoo! News reported the following about a management mapping tool.

Generally, the success of an ad is determined on how frequently it is viewed or clicked. Microsoft said the most commonly used metric in the industry, counting clicks, is a poor way to measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign.

Microsoft has introduced a reporting tool, called Engagement ROI, for its online advertising platform: Atlas Media Console.

Currently in beta, Engagement ROI looks at several aspects of an online ad, such as how recently it has been displayed, its size and its format, and then determines how successful the message is in influencing a purchase. Microsoft calls the concept “engagement mapping.”

So someone else has also thought of mapping time-based functions (how recently) to measure effectiveness (how successful). Sounds just like Objective Hierarchy Mapping and Information Trails, yeah!

Tracking Your Communications

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Yet another tracking software, this time for your BlackBerry. I don’t have one, so don’t know how it may affect my life, but I can imagine… Yahoo! News reports on Security Software Tracks BlackBerry Communications

Gwava, the developer of security software, plans to introduce today a product that lets enterprises easily track and find text messages and phone calls that BlackBerry users send and receive.

The software should appeal to enterprises that need to comply with regulations that require them to track employee communications. Key to the Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server is that it doesn’t require any client software. That means an IT administrator can manage it fully from the back end.

The BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which companies use to let workers send and receive corporate e-mail on their BlackBerry devices, already logs data about SMS (Short Message Service) text messages and e-mails sent and received. However, users must view the data in a giant Excel spreadsheet where each row is one transaction, said Mitch Lauer, director of business development for Gwava. “It’s extremely difficult to utilize,” he said.

“Our software goes into the BES and makes sense of all these logs,” he said. Retain shifts the data to a SQL database. IT administrators can then manipulate the data using a viewer that can be accessed on multiple workstations.

On the viewer, an administrator sees a list of BlackBerry users and can view their history of e-mails, text messages and phone calls. The list of e-mail and text messages includes the actual messages as well as who sent and received them. The phone call list includes the phone number of the person who called or was called and the length of the call.

Enterprises using BlackBerry phones can already easily audit e-mail messages because they run through a separate e-mail server, such as Microsoft Exchange. But tracking text messages is harder, and Retain lets administrators see e-mail, text messages and voice logs in a single view.

The software also tracks Pin messages, which are text messages that BlackBerry users can send to each other in a slightly different way than text messages offered by mobile operators.

IT administrators can also view data such as the top ten users of phone calls in chart form. To further analyze or investigate an issue, an administrator can also export the information into Excel.

I have written on several examples of tracking in our everyday activities on the Internet (from Amazon, Google, online games) in my book chapter1. This report is just one more example.

We are certainly getting “there”: an e-environment under constant surveillance. You are being tracked, like it or not.

1 Loh, C. S. (Jan 2007). Designing Online Games Assessment as Information Trails. In D. Gibson, C. Aldrich & M. Prensky (Eds.), Games and Simulation in Online Learning: Research and Development Frameworks (pp. 323-348). Hershey, PA: Idea Group, Inc. [More information and PDF]

Training Project Office (TPO) for gaming

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There is simply an incessant stream of news about the military and serious games! Wow!

Moreover, the Army are coming up with new projects to serious looking at this new training technology. Interactive Entertainment Today reported that the US Army has founded a new project office for games that focuses on training simulators.

The new project office, Training and Doctrine Command’s (TRADOC) Project Office for Gaming (TPO Gaming), is part of TRADOC’s National Simulation Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The office is headed by Col. Jack Millar as her director.

TPO Gaming’s purpose is to develop a toolkit that soldiers will be able to use themselves to create combat training scenarios. The are interested in the visualization of the technologies, rather than the entertainment part, and will focus on FPR and RTS games initially.

While there are plenty of war videogames available to everyday consumers, TPO Gaming doesn’t believe that any fill the requirements of a true simulation.

Millar said that aside from being immersive, the simulations should be “scalable, feature an intuitive interface, model behavior at the entity level, contain an after-action review capability and allow easy distribution.”

Although not all in the army agrees. Some prefers Commercial-off-the-shelf (OTS) games, and what they lack in depth or real-world applicability is made up for in convenience.

Cool! /Cool? Half empty of half full? Kupo?

Serious Games research lab

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I believe it was September 2004 when I first approached the School of Mass Communication and Media Arts to seek possibility in working towards having a “Serious Games degree at the place where I work, but the amount of red tapes involved in the process is simply unbelievable, especially when it is bottoms-up. This kind of ideas typically fall into the “to-down initiative” category and unless you know the chief it is really an upstream struggle. I am sad to report that the “talk” remains talk, and I know that with every passing semester I am losing the battle to make our University the first to offer Serious Games as a degree. Well, it is opportunity lost, and life have many such mis-opportunity. The right thing to do is, to learn to cut loss (on the time wasted) and quickly move on in search of new opportunity.

We then tried to create a Collaboratory for Interactive Learning Research (CILR) as a space to do such research. We can’t use Serious Games in the name because it needed to be more inclusive, and that’s okay, too. I am glad for the Collaboratory because we are really beginning to see it work, we have some showcase products and we are beginning to get into competition and showcases, the latest I/ITSEC being a good case in point. Some 16000 participants from all over the world attended the conference, and we made good contacts.

So I am happy to report that New York’s Parsons design school will be starting a new research lab to look into serious games, as well. I am seeing an opportunity to collaborate, there. Yahoo! News report: NY School Opens Lab for Serious Games

A new research lab at the prestigious Parsons design school aims to develop video games with a conscience (called “serious games”) and study whether playing them can be a force for social good. The games, which aim to educate, appeal mostly to a niche market and are used to train public officials, students and professionals in various fields. The U.S. military, for example, trains with games that model terrorist attacks, school hostage crises and natural disasters. Other serious games teach nonviolent ways of fighting dictators and military occupiers.

Director Colleen Macklin hopes research at Parsons The New School of Design’s PETLab, launched Wednesday and made up of students and faculty, will make serious games more mainstream. “Our goal is really to create intersections between game design, social issues and learning,” she said.

PETLab, in the first such effort in the country, will create models of new types of games or interactive designs that address social issues and will do interactive research on whether playing the games helps effect positive social change. It is funded by a $450,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation as part of the foundation’s study of how digital technologies are changing the way people learn and socialize.

Lab researchers hope to create more games like the popular “Ayiti: The Cost of Life,” developed by the nonprofit Global Kids and tech company GameLab, in which players manage life for a virtual family of five in rural Haiti. The object of the game is to make spending decisions (saving money vs. throwing a party vs. buying food) that keep the family healthy.

PETLab has partnered with Games for Change, a nonprofit group that supports serious game designers and provides a forum for designers to show off their work. “We’re planting seeds for the next generation of game makers,” said Suzanne Seggerman, founder of Games for Change. “How amazing would it be to have ‘Fast Food Nation’ or ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ as a video game, where players can actually learn how to make their environment better through the game?”

So far, the lab is working with Microsoft Corp., studying whether the software maker’s Xbox game development tool could be modified to create socially conscious games. The lab also is working with the social arm of MTV’s Web site, think.MTV.com, which offers information on the environment, sexual health and immigration. And it is designing tutorials on creating games for young people.

Is PETLab the first such (serious games research) effort in the country? I don’t think so. But hey, they are the first with a $450,000 grant from MacArthur Foundation, and they are the first to claim they are first. :-)

May be it’s time to see if we can ramp up some support for our lab, too.