To readers of this site the news that the Pentagon and other militaries are using games and game-based technologies as training and policy exploration tools is neither shock nor awe.  That use of games now extends beyond the defense sector to other government agencies, corporations, and educators shouldn't be huge news either.  The roots of game play as something other the entertainment are as old as man itself - and even older if one has ever watched the rough and tumble of wolf kits, or bear cubs, or young lions. 

The use of games is something the military has had fits and starts on but in today's world it has been gaining steadily for two reasons.  First, budgets coupled with the GWOT are forcing the military to become larger consumers of simulation.  The training funds and appropriation funds just aren't large enough to support as much live-training exercises both in terms of time and equipment wear & tear.  At the same time games are featuring ever more fidelity and at costs that are fractional compared to some of the other spending on sims the military (or the government in general) do.  As a final sort of kicker the ability for games to be a pervasive form of "free-time" training (i.e. Xboxes in the barracks, flight simulator at home) is considered a useful opportunity to take advantage of.  This of course is driven not only by the cost but by the increasing consumption of games by each new generation.  As Willie Sutton once said - you rob banks because that's where the money is.

So what's new isn't the notion itself but the notion that we might actually see gaming become a heavily accepted form of training, learning, and general problem solving technology.  We're going from an era of one off innovations and experiments to potentially standing programs.  We're going from the dismissive opinion that games are a fad in general to games are the most important youth form of media today.  We're going from the idea that game developers are a bunch of hacks to "game companies are where all the best programmers are" as Tom Clancy wrote in his most recent title - not once but twice.  It's an exciting prospect but to calm the hype I'd say it's equally important that while the zeitgeist may be tipping in videogaming's direction there is still a lot of research, development, and convincing to do.

To help coral all of the current momentum several projects have sprouted up to build the dialogue, push the ideas, and instigate more activity.  One of these programs is The Serious Games Initiative (www.seriousgames.org) which is housed at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.  Others include The Education Arcade @ M.I.T. and programs like MediaX @ Stanford, IC2 at University of Texas, and Room 130 at the University of Wisconsin. 

Each of these groups is looking at different aspects of computer gaming that can be applied to other fields.  In some cases it involves the use of commercial off-the-shelf games such as Civilization or Point of Attack.  Other times it involves the creation of an entirely new "serious game" from scratch but it can also involve modifying an existing game or game engine.  The Army used Unreal Engine to power America's Army but the Marines used Atomic Games Close Combat engine to power their real-time training project. 

At times it might just be something I call "gamish" which is the use of game style interfaces, visualizations, and creativity to power an otherwise application style product.  For example, when we showed the interface to a business sim we were involved in one manager said that our graphs, user interface, and other visuals were "far and away better then the (stuff) he got from his normal ERP system."  The folks at Sandia National Laboratories agree and have been looking at various game systems to increase their work on visualization design. 

This means it?s not just games themselves that are in demand it?s the general talent and production ethics that computer game developers have honed on their own for 30 years that are in-demand.

The activity has reached such a level that on October 18-19, 2004 developers and customers are gathering in Washington, D.C. at the first Serious Games Summit DC <www.seriousgamessummit.com>.  This is a sequel event to a recent meeting held at the Game Developer's Conference in San Jose (you can find archives of that event at www.seriousgames.org/wiki/.  Over 300 people are expected to attend and sessions range from discussion on AI, visualization, story-based training, to topics on use of off-the-shelf wargame technology, and what it's like when a big prime contractor works with boutique game studios that only you and I have probably heard of.

So what does this mean for you - especially if you're just content with being a game player, grognard or otherwise?  First off it should mean better games in the long run.  In my vision of a so-called serious games market non-entertainment organizations contract frequently with independent game development studios to create the works they need.  This results in more work for studios especially those that push out strategy games because no one needs a game to train you how to jump over barrels better or eat lots of white dots faster.  In many cases the results of this work allow the studios to keep the IP they create so a project that results in better AI algorithms for a Pentagon war-game might find its way back into your next favorite wargame.  In short a healthy thriving serious game market will buttress the commercial market.  I believe this is especially so for niche types of titles like wargames, business simulations, simulations, and many of the types of games readers of this site probably wish there was more of.

Serious game projects are also asking developers to raise the amount of subject matter expertise in their games.  As we see with titles like Full Spectrum Warrior, and America's Army the level of detail in tactics, rules of engagement, team roles, and more is at a very high level.  This sort of interaction with developers doesn't disappear once the title is done.  It stays with developers even when the next title isn't commissioned by a service branch.

My counterpart at Woodrow, David Rejeski, says the idea of all of this is to "Game our way to a better future".  It's a basic concept that could easily be misconstrued into "all-games all-the-time" but in reality all it tries to say is games have a role to play in our future.  At the Serious Games Summit in October we feature two keynotes, one by StrategyPage's own Jim Dunnigan, and another by Johnny Wilson, game-historian and former editor of Computer Gaming World.  So while we're talking about games playing a role in our future, Jim and Johnny will remind us how much games have already played a role in our past.  If that's the case then hopefully history will repeat itself - only more so.

Ben Sawyer is the co-founder of the Serious Games Initiative and is also president of Digitalmill, Inc. a Portland, ME based consulting and development firm.  He has been working on evangelizing and building games for non-entertainment purposes for the past three-years.  In October he will serve as content chair for the Serious Games Summit DC.