Serious Games Summit Thoughts - Day 2

Below are my thoughts on the second day of the Serious Games Summit, in the order of the presentations I attended.

Patty Fry, J.C. Herz, Robert Gehorsam, Jesse Schell - Serious Multiplayer Gaming: What does it take?
This was one of those presentations where I was hoping for a lot, but came away with only a little. Part of the problem might have been that it was 9am, I had spent quite a bit of time at the America's Army reception the night before and then a UK Developer get together, and lastly the technology in the ballroom (IE: Projectors) were not working correctly. Looking back at my notes, the main points from this session were:
- Connecting with people online is equal to connecting with people in a face-to-face environment. The real world and the online world are bleeding together (see Snow Crash and Neuromancer)
- Online Worlds can also foster Futures Markets, that could prove to be invaluable R&D efforts both within and outside virtual worlds
- Games, whether played online or not, can develop communities (Ex: the Sims content creation and sharing pages). Always try and nurture these communities
- Community building is dam hard! When community building, be sure you provide the technology/ability for people to communicate, and be sure to give them something they *want* to talk about
- In terms of infrastructure, online games need a lobby zone, community zone, game zone, infrastructure zone, back-end zone, and a development & test zone. Some of these are parts of the actual game, others deal with infrastructure
Final thoughts: again, this presentation was ok, but I was hoping for much more. Maybe if the technology were in place, we would have seen and heard about some interesting things. Instead, we got mostly "MMO 101" content.

Kurt Squire - What happens when games go into any classroom situation?
I only have a handful of notes from this presentation, as I've seen most of it before (GDC). The first part of the presentation seemed to have some new content, then I had to leave to checkout of my room when Kurt got into his experiences introducing Civilization into classes.
- We, as a group, still don't really know what constitutes a good serious game
- We don't know how technology will be socially constructed
- We don't know how our audiences will interpret gameplay (may be different from how gamers interpret gameplay)
- Games are not grounded in any learning theory (which seems to be a hurdle at this point for serious games)
- Games need to be studied in cultural contexts
- Civilization University - amazing, self-formed community of modders and players, where the community tries to create better Civilization players
Final thoughts: Squire's presentation was pretty good, but seemed to re-hash quite a bit from last year's summit (and from E3's Educational Arcade from what I've been told). Some of the frontend has been re-worked to include some good stuff though, including some charts/models that I can't concisely re-create in text.

Tom McCormack - Inside building an engine for learning games
Tom's presentation was very interesting, ranging from process, to engine specs, to actual code reviews. Some things I came away with:
- Educational market is tricky for games because it has been burned before, it is cost sensitive.
- Educational market is also ready for change, and looks for opportunity to re-use and expand on content bases (something games are good at)
- Teachers require accuracy, transparency, customization, feedback, and usability in their teaching tools -> games need to provide these
- To make this work, we need a critical mass of content -> not only games, but also support materials and communities
- We need layers of interfaces both in terms of development, and also for our variety of users
- Develop in disparate models/modules (small chunks that can then link together)
- Develop tools for SMEs and content contributors to easily contribute to the development process
- Allow the AI to be 'tinkerable' - non programmers should be able to adjust difficulty levels for students
Final thoughts: I found this presentation pretty good in terms of process and competencies necassary to build a game engine (or utilize an engine), and also some good support issues. I might have been in the minority here though, because tom's presentation was somewhat 'techy', and I got the impression most people in the audience were non-tech related people. Lots of talk about XML in this presentation and how it can be used as the data engine to drive game components...which is all good stuff, but most of the audience had a glazed look on their faces.

Tim Holt - How mods are really built
Tim works at Valve, and was part of the team that developed the Day of Defeat mod. So I came in expecting to hear or see some good stuff...and I did. Although I had seen all the videos he showed from HL2, it was fun to see them on a big screen, and the look on peoples' faces who have never seen any HL2 gameplay yet. This presentation seemed to draw a variety of people, and some of the older folks in the audience actually seemed a bit frightened after watching some of the trailers (specifically the squad-based combat trailer). Tim did a great job of re-iterating that you need to think out of the box, and these characters don't have to be carrying guns, but you could utilize the AI and other elements in SO many different ways. It seems that only about 1/2 the audience really understood this, and the rest of the audience just saw another FPS game we're you're running around and killing things...only in this game, it looks dam realistic (again, I think this scared some people in the audience). Some of the notes I have:
- Mods allow easy leverage of pre-created resources, like rendering, art, multiplayer, communications, demo and playback ability, etc.
- Games that allow mods = instant community building
- Mods represent free research, or 'farm teams' for ideas that the game developers can keep coming back to
- Creating a mod invovles creating maps, adding textures to a map, doing sound and audio work, modifying models and animations, then creating code for new actions and interactions
- Mod community is fanatical, opinionated, consists of players and game makers, interactive, and international (these are mostly good, but can sometimes be bad)
Final thoughts: I thought this was a good presentation, especially for those people who don't understand the whole mod phenomenon. I think some members of the audience still didn't get it, but it did enlighten many others. Also some good bits of information on how to go about creating a mod.