Games vs. Virtual Worlds for Nation-sized Problems

3D Shooters are the most prominent form of game system and environment in the consumer and the defense space. These portray conflict, combat, and deadly threats. They immediately plunge the player into a simulating environment with urgent problems to solve. They also mirror some of the most important engagements that real people and real societies engage in. However, these environments are extremely limited in time and space. The battlefield is a relatively small area – usually just large enough to contain a specific vignette, and never so large that the players can wander far enough to miss the entire point of that piece of the world. These vignettes and geospaces are linked together in such a way that the player can move immediately from one “hot spot” to the next. There is no room in these for intervening relationship building, downtime learning, AAR, or planning for the next engagement. For entertainment this hot-spot-hopping is exactly what you want. But as a venue for wrestling with real problems, this is a very small and single-focused experience.

MMOGs create a much larger space in which player spend more time wandering, conversing, building relationships, and joining clans that will participate in specific battles. It includes spaces for combat, socialization, trade, and exploration. This size and diversity enables a much broader and somewhat richer experience of the world and the other players in it. Specific battles may still be the focus for many players, but they can also plan, rehearse, and regale in stories surrounding these as well. The algorithms that determine engagement outcomes, but battle and trade, are simple – often just subtracting and adding points to a player’s health.

Virtual Worlds create an world that can be smooth and continuous like the real world. They can create context, connections, and history that is similar to what exists in the real world. But in their current state they are only slightly different from MMOGs. Second Life, and others like it, are unique in that the content is created by the users, not by the development company. This begins to allow the users to shape the world to meet their needs. But to really become distinct and useful, these spaces need to allow the users to upload/link their own models into the world. The VW needs to provide an infrastructure that can accommodate heterogeneous models provided by users and allow these diverse models to interact with each other. Business and Government problems cannot be represented by generic one-size-fits-all models provided by an entertainment company.

Each game designs a set of models that meet the needs of that game. The preference is to create sparse models that are computationally inexpensive and that fit together to allow interactions across all of the objects in a space. As virtual worlds are adopted to the needs of real government and intelligence customers, there is going to be a need to (1) add much more complex models that require more computational power, (2) bring together a very diverse set of models that were not originally meant to work together. A government Virtual World cannot align these models one at a time, that is an N-squared problem that will very quickly become impossible to manage. There needs to be an infrastructure that allows heterogeneous models to be integrated into the world and to work with the existing models without requiring customer model-to-model modifications. This would be a big environment with an underlying software infrastructure that present real value to the government.

For the complete briefing see: http://www.peostri.army.mil/CTO

Microsoft Open XNA

In 2004, the game Full Spectrum Warrior for the Xbox was published. It was a long and difficult collaboration between the Army, game developers, and Microsoft. With the exception of this game, consoles have been off-limits to serious game developers. The expensive development platforms and licensing agreements focused on games with broad appeal that would be sold in the millions of copies. However, Microsoft has made significant changes to its development model. It is now possible to develop for the Xbox360 without a specialized computer. Microsoft has also just opened up its Xbox Live service so that any independent developer can create a game and get it distributed as a software download through this online service. Potentially, this may open up the console for serious games in military training. These downloadable games will be reviewed by a committee to determine whether they violate any IP or contain objectionable content. If cleared, then they will be posted on Xbox Live for customer purchase and download. This could become an avenue for serious games distribution as well.

New Ideas from Next Door

Where do new ideas come from? There are the researchers who look for the next big thing in any industry, including simulation. They seek to improve the state of tools or science based on limitations that customers have right now. The simulation community has been clamoring for better interoperability, shared and rapid terrain generation, and more powerful AI for decades. There are entire conferences and committees that explore and discuss each of these.

But who is looking at how multi-core PCs might fundamentally change the simulation industry? Who can see how to apply business IT tools to simulation? What about supercomputers and Web 2.0 tools? Adjacent to simulation are a number of fields that are thriving on different, but related customer problems - as well as lots of money to solve them. Digging deeper in the same hole is not always the best way to solve the problems that are in the hole with you. Sometimes you need to get out of the hole and see what your neighbors are doing in their holes. Your technology neighbors are just as smart as the people in your hole, perhaps smarter. And often by looking at a similar problem from a different angle they come up with a solution that really makes the problem look a lot easier.

Another advantage of the neighbors hole is that you are not required to be consistent with all of the historical work that have been done in your own area. You are allowed to think and explore at tangents that are just not quite proper in the official hole. Gian Zaccai at the Design Continuum says that, "moving among many different industries frees you from the dogma of any one industry and their firm belief in the links between problems and solutions." Andrew Hargadon at UC Davis believes that "bridging multiple worlds, in essence, makes you less susceptible to the pressures of conforming in any one because you have somewhere else to go."

So where some promising places to look for technologies that are valuable in teh simulation world? I like:

1. High Performance Computing, including multicore and GPU.
   
2. Business IT, including the Service Oriented Architecture.
   
3. Computer Games, with emphasis on their tools for creating simulations.
   
4. Web 2.0 because they are all about collaboration, networking, and authoring unique information.
   

When I look at what these communities are doing I see so many great ideas that can be used directly in our community. The struggle is always in bringing new ideas from the neighbors next door and convincing my own family that they are valuable. Imagine how the two Marines who created Marine Doom felt back in the 1990's when they introduced their ideas. Back then it was, "that's nice how made a toy look more real". Today the toys are overturning big parts of the industry. All of the industries listed above offer similarly powerful tools.

Get out of your hole and go visit the neighbors.