“Alt game dev”..Those words alone connote the clipped speech of a highly intelligent lifestyle game developer.
Hmm, what about Game Tech? or Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds Con 2011? What is being developed there?
At the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds Con 2011- a conference that concerns itself with the usage of virtual worlds by our federal and local governments, we asked these questions: what is the state of gaming in virtual worlds being used by our government?, how do games help us? and how do people in our government use games?
The participants came from the military, government, and education, from near and foreign lands, to see how data and games can work together, how new innovations in augmented reality and virtual worlds are changing how we run the government, how we train the military, and how we see ourselves.
We talked about SENDS (Science Enhanced Network Domains and Secure Social Spaces), with Dr. Carl Hunt and went on a virtual tour of social spaces with Craig Harm. We learned about their indoctrination to virtual worlds as they seek to found a new science for the study cyberspace, http://sendsonline.org/
We are creating a new learning eco-system, one that is heavily invested in games, and more of these games are being played in cyberspace than ever before. Dr. Hunt asks “How do we secure this domain that is less than 20 years old?”.
David A. Smith (Lockheed Martin) talked about the “Augmented Human”, and the creation of successful technology that has become “invisible” like the keyboard and the mouse. He noted that we have the desire to create a shared reality; we are social animals after all. He also asked, “have you made something good enough to criticize?” , and “have you made a game that lets you communicate?, because that is how you are defined, by how you communicate.”
In the Rapid Design and Development of Virtual Worlds Training Courses workshop, we learned of a CUNY program that has concerned itself with a virtual disaster training environment called “Hurricane Shelter Simulation” for New York City. Andrew Boyarsky (CUNY, School of Professional Studies) and Anders Gronstedt (Gronstedt Group) are the creators of that award winning project, which you can read about here- Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge 2011-http://www.fvwc.army.mil/ In fact, we were set into teams and created our own versions of problem solving environments during that course.
Later in the day, the Virtual Worlds in Government panel, recapped the CUNY project and brought us new information of three other vital projects. Dr. Kevin Holloway, talked about his National Center for Telehealth and Technology http://t2health.org/ and its virtual worlds project that aims to “leverage the affordances of virtual worlds to improve access to and quality of psychological health care services to Service Members, Veterans and their families” . He uses games and virtual scenarios to help people understand and recover from post traumatic stress disorder.
William May, the director of the Office of Innovative Engagement, which supports the US Department of State’s , Public Diplomacy efforts, talked about his “Cairo to Kansas” project , http://archrecord.construction.com/archrecord2/work/2010/June/Kansas_to_Cairo.asp.
Bringing young people from two cultures together for to build something, in a virtual space. Not just architecture, but bridges of peace and understanding.
Doug Maxwell, MSME, Science and Technology manager at the Simulation and Training Technology Center in Orlando, spoke about his projects, the EDGE project http://fvwc.army.mil/edge which is concerned with massive scalability and accurate operational environment replication as well as MOSES, Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy, http://fvwc.army.mil/moses/ . MOSES is a huge virtual environment built for military simulations, it is open for viewing by registered visitors. This significant build features real terrain data made virtual, as well as several configurations of virtual environments and server types for comparison of performance.
When we exert effort to create virtual worlds and the games we play in them, we use up part of our lifetime to do so.
In the 1970′s, an industrial designer named Victor Papanek , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Papanek , decided to set a challenge out for other designers. He devoted 10% of his time to designing things that would make the world better. It is gratifying to see, that his idea is still being practiced. Imagine if all of us did that.
There are many people in the world who do good things, who think about our global problems and how to solve them- these are some of those folks, and they do it with game environments and virtual worlds. They deserve to be recognized.