Computing Now
March 2009 - SERIOUS GAMES: EDITORS' INTRODUCTION
by Tiffany Barnes and L. Miguel Encarnação
Serious games use video game technologies to simulate realistic situations, providing valuable experience that can support discovery and exploration while saving money and lives. Serious games have been used for many purposes, including flight and vehicle simulation, scientific simulation and visualization, industrial and military training, medical and health training, education, and geographic information systems, as well as to raise public awareness and spur policy change. The articles in this month's theme look at serious games and related technologies from a variety of perspectives.
In "Making Them Remember-Emotional Virtual Characters with Memory," Zerrin Kasap, Maher Ben Moussa, Parag Chaudhuri, and Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann introduce techniques for having virtual characters "remember" interactions with player-learners, enabling serious games to tap into emotions to connect with and motivate players. They also introduce techniques for augmented reality (AR), an exciting new area for serious games that lets us use real-world artifacts in simulated situations. Advances in the use of emotion and AR can make serious games more immersive, intelligent, and believable, and expand the domains they can address.
New interfaces for virtual reality and interaction have made their way into games for exercise (exergames), which are being tapped as tools for researching physical health. Ben Sawyer's "From Cells to Cell Processors: The Integration of Health and Video Games" showcases many of the ways in which health and games can be integrated. In "Using a Virtual Body to Aid in Exergaming System Development," Jeff Sinclair, Philip Hingston, Martin Masek, and Ken Nosaka present a way to simulate physical exertion that will help reduce the time it takes to test and develop exergames. Their innovation is a simulated model of physiological performance metrics such as heart rate. Using this model, the playtester can make gameplay decisions without having to strenuously perform the required physical activities.
Serious games have great potential for providing scalable, repeatable training, especially for cultural and social skills and understanding. In "Culture, Models, and Games: Incorporating Warfare's Human Dimension," S.K. Numrich explores the new need to understand the roles that culture and the "human dimension" play in modern conflicts and other domains. Expressing the richness of place, culture, and society in simulation and training is becoming critical for business and political commerce.
Another way serious games enable cultural exploration is through location-based games at significant places, such as those in "Experiencing the Past through the Senses: An M-Learning Game at Archaeological Parks." Authors Carmelo Ardito, Paolo Buono, Maria F. Costabile, Rosa Lanzilotti, Thomas Pederson, and Antonio Piccinno use a mobile-phone-based game with local sound effects to engage children in exploring ruins and information about the past while playing the role of a character out of history.
While serious games offer venues for new experiences, there is a need to continually evaluate the effectiveness of game approaches for their intended purposes. In "To Game or Not to Game?" Christiane Gresse von Wangenheim and Forrest Shull present a meta-review of games used for teaching software engineering. They find that out of 21 studies in this area, just a few of them were conducted using rigorous experimental methods, but many were used to teach the "soft" skills related to project management.
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