Serious Games Note 1

I’m here to think about the new designs we can create, to learn more about the field, to learn more about assessment and what the edge of research and development is.

Lots of military.

Peter Perla:

The Science of Wargaming.

Peter’s initial assumption: wargaming is an art, or a craft, not a science.
Friend Steve: BUT it has to be! B/C of surgery metaphor.

How can you teach people to develop wargames, if they are not a science, and the developers are not geniuses?
There must be techniques that uninspired people can use to make mediocre games. (Is he serious?)

Peter’s definition of wargaming: A warfare model or simulation that does not involve the operations of actual forces, in which the flow of events affects and is affected by decisions made during the course of those events by players representing the opposing sides.

Wargames have: time, space, forces (troops AND physics), effects, information, command. A synthetic universe in which learners must act and learn.

How do we make the wargame more like war in a scientific way?

Domains of real war: information domain(apriori, documented knowledge — information systems); physical; cognitive(understanding, awareness, and assessment of situation)

The science of wargaming is to articulate definitions and postulates and use them to prove or disprove the connections between war and wargame. Wargame “realism”: does the learner understand clear connections between war and wargame?

Metaphor as science. hmmmmmmmmm

Four philosophers: carl von clausewitz | friction and chance, mark herman | entropy-based warfare, martin van creveld | command and uncertainty, paul vebber | network effects

Keys:
Friction, destruction, disruption and chance
entropy: inherent energy that’s unavailable for carrying out the mission
entropy leads to uncertainty, which military command systems exist to overcome
command counters friction/direction, destruction/leadership, disruption/information
decreasing in one dimension increases others.
success is relatively better control of entropy.

Game designers must find a way to represent these variables of real war though the limited parameters through the dimensions of wargaming. To do so, one must condense the real-war domains into wargame topologies: information, operational, and command.

The true measure of the realism of a game is the degree of agreement between how the players relate to the game’s universe through the game topologies and the real relations of real war.

Non warmongers must

identify basic scientific principles of the field.
identify the philosophers who have thought most widely and deeply.
what basic concepts must your game represent?
how can you make them tangible in your game universe?
just do it! and make art of this science. yay.

Making a good serious game is like Good Eats. Knowing the science will free you to make great art.

Doug Whatley:

What’s so serious about game design?

“Perhaps the most fatal flaw in the education of young people is that we apprentice youngsters into 19th century science rather than letting them play scientist.” donald e thompson, NSF

game-based learning must change the process. it’s not just a new technique for an old process.

A serious game, accg to doug, is a product that is not specifically entertainment, but which uses entertainment or the techniques and processes of the entertainment business to achieve a purpose.

This should be a new paradigm, not just a new mode of e-learning.

Production stages:

CONCEPT: craft a vision statement for the product. how will the learning be presented to the learners? How, exactly, will the game teach? Have a separate statement for the project itself. < 1 month (in 18-24 month timeline)
DESIGN: design document, technical design document, risk mitigation document. 3 months.
PROTOTYPE: satisfy risk issues, prove the concept. finish this phase with a working prototype, or at least proofs of concept that address the risk issues outlined in the mitigation document. 3 months.
PREPRODUCTION: 6 months. Identify pipeline, establish processes for generating game. sometimes this generates a slice of the game, if that slice is isolatable. Making sure the pipeline is established and watertight.
PRODUCTION: 6 months. All the elements of the pipeline should be tight. This should operate on the 9 women having a baby in a month principle because the project has been established and scheduled. cranking it out.
TESTING: 3 months. test, test, test. Code complete (alpha), and THEN content complete (beta).
SUPPORT: ? Ongoing support of game for client.

Types of games:

training : a metric, a task, developable skills (which are typically a narrowly defined set of skills). the end result of this is the measurement of some sort of skills along some baseline.
education : a problem formation and the expansion of cognitive ability. an attempt to assist the learner in applying learning in new contexts.
simulation : a speculative exercise with rules, goals and containing a disequlibria outcome. Typically it has a mathematical underpinning.
play : an analytical tool, say, where the learner can play with ideas. unknown and unexpected outcomes. we attempt to let kids make things explode.
toys : toys are fun objects that allow one to explore the elements of an object or concept. symbolic models of concepts that can be explored.

the design document needs to embody a knowledge transfer between the subject matter expert and the game developer. the developers must live the process thoroughly.

TIME – time needs to relate meaningfully to periods in a competitive/real environment.
SPACE – what is the granularity of this world? how much fidelity is really needed?
ENTITIES – what is being manipulated? (objects)
EFFECTS – how do entities interact with the world? (methods, functions). game building tends to be more effects-based than physics-based.
INFORMATION – how is the context/world and its entites represented? what data do they hold?
COMMAND – what actions can be taken?

OODA loops need to match between developer and client. design needs to be FUNGIBLE. developers need to address feedback from client with subsequent iterations in a FORMAL way. Good teams do need to make the product their own. Communication solves all problems.

Client: understand that the product will evolve over time. The statement of work should allow some flexibility in development.

BreakAway’s EULA. “Death and dismemberment are not our fault.” YIKES

Question and Answer:

simulating physics rather than effects… more details? effects are not necessarily “real”. rather they embody metaphors of action and consequence.

guy who doesn’t have a question, just wants to hear himself talk.