Story and Simulations for Serious Games. Tales from the Trenches

221 Pages·2007·3.647 MB·English

by  Nick Iuppa and Terry Borst (Auth.)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Iuppa, Nicholas V.
Story and simulations for serious games : tales from the trenches / Nick Iuppa & Terry Borst.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-240-80788-X (alk. paper)
1. Digital computer simulation. 2. Computer games—Programming. I. Borst, Terry. II. Title.
III. Title: Story and simulations for serious games.
QA76.9.C65I86 2006
794.8′1526—dc22
2006024346
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 13: 978-0-240-80788-1
ISBN 10: 0-240-80788-X
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The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
Hamlet, act 2 scene 2
To Ginny and Carolyn
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully wish to acknowledge the following contributors to the
development of the three projects that form the core content of this book.
Department of Defense
Dr. Anita Jones
Dr. Judith Dahmann
Del Lunceford
United States Army
Dr. Michael Andrews
Dr. Michael Macedonia
Dr. James T. Blake, Ph.D.
Dr. Kent Pickett
Dr. Stanley M. Halpin
Dr. Stephen L. Goldberg
James (Pat) O’Neal, Brigadier General, U.S. Army (Retired)
Forrest Crane (Retired)
Susan Harkrider
LTC Donna Brazil
Industrial College of the Armed Forces
Dr. Alan Whittaker
Mitre Corporation
Marnie Salisbury
Paramount Simulation Group
Dr. Gershon Weltman
Janet Herrington
Larry Tuch
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x Story, Simulations, and Serious Games
Nathaniel Fast
Alex Singer
Harry Dorsey
Roland Lesterlin
Florence Maggio
Judith Singer
Paramount Television
Kerry McCluggage
Steve Goldman
Bob Sheehan
Bruce Pottash
Kim Fitzgerald
Stephen Sacks
Carolyn Petty
Paramount Pictures
Tom McGrath
Bruce Toby
Paramount Digital Entertainment
David Wertheimer
Leonard Washington
Marc Wade
Mark Tapio Kines
Erin Powers
Mark Goffman
Institute for Creative Technologies—University of Southern California
Richard Lindheim
David Wertheimer
Dr. Andrew Gordon
Dr. William R. Swartout
Dr. Randy Hill
Dr. Michael van Lent
Martin van Velsen
Kurosh ValaNejad
David Hendrie
Paul Carpenter
David Miraglia
Travis Castillo
Ian Mankowski
Yuki Miyaki
Acknowledgments xi
Richard Almodovar
Hafid Roserie
Alan Lee
Laurie Swanson
Regina Cabrera
University of Southern California
Dr. Paul Rosenbloom
Dr. Patricia Riley
Dr. W. Louis Johnson
ICT Research Assistants
Arnav Jhala
Brian Magerko
Keith Miron
Tim Smith
United States Army Research Development and Engineering Command
(RDECOM)
United States Army Simulation and Technology Training Center (STTC)
The authors also wish to acknowledge the Wikipedia website (http://www.
wikipedia.org) and the online archives of Game Developermagazine as significant
aids in researching and verifying information; along with Greg Roach’s gener-
ous sharing of his ideas regarding media costs and benefits while teaching along-
side him at USC’s School of Cinema-Television.
All images and graphics from the Leaders, ALTSIM and Final Flurry projects are
used by permission of Paramount Pictures.
Introduction:
The Road to StoryDrive
Northeastern Bosnia, 1998. The refugees of ethnic conflict are returning. But they
aren’t welcome. Paramilitary thugs are determined to drive them out and drag their
NATO protectors into a mire of guerrilla attacks and urban combat.
In the town of Celic, a platoon of U.S. peacekeeping troops inspects a Weapons Storage
Site. Weapons are missing and a hostile crowd has surrounded the site. The Platoon
Leader radios for assistance.
At the Brigade Tactical Operation Center...
The BATTLE CAPTAIN picks up the call—and the job of launching a rescue mission.
His Commander instructs him to “Deliver the force with speed and surprise.” The Battle
Captain’s response: Operation Cobra Strike. Mission: secure the town of Celic and neu-
tralize the threat. Action: An air assault force will establish a cordon and seal the town.
Mechanized infantry will roll in, rescue the weapons inspection team and protect the
residents and refugees.
The Battle Captain broadcasts the order to all units: load up and get ready to roll.
At that moment a call from the Platoon Leader at the Weapons Storage Site reports that
the crowd has grown larger and that shots have been fired at his troops.
So reads the description of a new kind of military simulation: one that attempts
to engage users in a collaborative exercise in which they take on the roles of the
Battle Captain and his staff and attempt to engineer the rescue of the endangered
platoon. It is a simulation driven by a story that was designed, written and
created by a Hollywood motion picture studio.
The exercise represents one of the first and most important efforts in the
difficult struggle to bring the full power and effect of storytelling into the realm
xvii
xviii Story, Simulations, and Serious Games
of simulation. The benefits of story in simulation training have been quite appar-
ent to the US military and to trainers and game designers alike. Stories can
engage participants, make their experience more memorable, help them learn,
and help them transfer that learning to the real world. Stories can portray the
full complexity of a difficult situation; they can induce the kind of tension and
stress that learners must become familiar with when it becomes a major part of
their jobs.
These are all things that a good Hollywood movie can achieve through
cinematic storytelling. But the mechanics of combining the structure of a good
story with the sense of free will needed to have a believable simulation have
always seemed difficult or impossible to achieve.
The book you’re holding in your hands addresses this challenge. And to
see how this can benefit you, read on.
1
Who This Book is For
You could be working for an oil company, involved with training workers to
operate on offshore oil platforms, and concerned about new security issues in
this environment. You could be working for a financial services company,
involved with training employees to move into management responsibilities.
You could be working for a nongovernmental organization that must train its
field workers to contend with broad cultural differences in order to provide relief
services and aid to overseas populations. You could be working for a state or
county entity that needs to prepare first responders for potential new disaster
situations.
In short, you may be involved in some form or manner (however tenuously)
with the transfer of training, educational, or pedagogical material to employees
or volunteers. In today’s rapidly changing world, these employees and
volunteers frequently need new skills, knowledge, and experiences to better
compete in the global marketplace, and to respond to new challenges and job
demands.
In the past, that transfer might have been handled by more experienced
workers conducting walkthroughs for less experienced workers. Or, a workbook
or other training materials may have been devised to teach employees new skills.
A video illustrating new principles and concepts may have been produced as
well.
But in the 21st century, these methodologies have become less effective. For
starters, today’s employees have grown up bombarded with media stimuli, and
they’re very practiced in tuning out droning lectures, boring print material, and
“educational videos.” In addition, the transferable pedagogy has become increas-
ingly complex and nuanced, lending itself less well to traditional learning
methods such as rote memorization, multiple choice testing, and watch-the-film-
strip-and-get-it. Finally, in the era of mergers and acquisitions, budgets for one-
on-one training and workshops with no clear-cut ROI (return on investment) are
often slashed or eliminated.
1
2 Story, Simulations, and Serious Games
Today’s employees have grown up with fast-paced, immersive, interactive
media. Today’s technologies have enabled the relatively inexpensive construc-
tion of computer environments offering varying degrees of user immersion, user
participation, and “virtual reality.” In short: simulations.
Videogames like Grand Theft Auto and Halo are simulation environments.
Very recently, these environments have become a partial basis for the Serious
Games movement: videogames designed with serious teaching and training
purposes.
You, or your boss, may have heard of these simulations or serious games.
Perhaps the competition is already using or creating one. Perhaps budget money
is available to build one. Perhaps you’d just like to see if you can reach your
employees in more effective ways, and maybe the building of a simulation is the
right step for this.
But you’ve never built a simulation or serious game. You do a little research
and you find out that when Rockstar Games or Microsoft produces a game, they
spend millions and millions of dollars.
And if the task isn’t daunting enough, suddenly your boss says, “Oh yeah,
and it should have a story.” Or, perhaps you begin going out to professionals
about your nascent simulation project, and sooner or later one of them asks,
“What’s the narrative that holds this thing together?”
Now what?
This book is about confronting this challenge, and showing that designing
an interactive, story-driven, pedagogical simulation is not as impossible as it
might seem.
The origin of this book rests in a remarkable collaboration that took place
between Paramount Pictures, USC’s Institute for Creative Technology, and the
United States Army. Their intent was to build serious games: interactive, story-
driven simulations that would train officers and commanders to handle various
crisis situations.
However, the lessons and observations from this collaboration are applica-
ble to the building of serious games in any professional, educational, vocational,
or volunteer arena. Given the ubiquity and inexpensiveness of technology and
distribution, an organization of almost any size can contemplate the building of
a serious game to address training and educational needs.
The first half of this book begins by outlining three major projects that
Hollywood created for the United States Military. These projects were expressly
designed to place storytelling at the heart of the simulation. This first half will
then take a broader look at what constitutes story and character, and how
these components can be successfully integrated into a teaching experience,
while reviewing the design principles and the paradigms developed in the
Hollywood/military collaboration. We’ll move on to how the instructor is
incorporated into a training simulation, and how automated story generation
may assist in the replayability of simulation scenarios.