Defense GameTech '09 in SL: First Day

Just completed a day of seminars delivered via SecondLife from GameTech 09. Some tidbits from my followup notes:

• BBN is working on an open source middleware product that is currently based on Delta3D
  
• Onsite participants are able to see a demo featuring an integrated Wii Fit controller
  
• Angel Rodriguez reported on work that integrates the Army's OneSAF with various game environments. One amusing anecdote mentions that a restart of OneSAF was facilitated by state information that had been preserved in the game environment, and was used by OneSAF in its restart to restore context.
  
• Angel Rodriguez says they're finding that Collada still has legs.
  
• Mark Oehlert from the Defense Acquisition University was very enthusiastic about Kongregate, especially as a proving ground for testing concepts that the military might find useful. He likewise applauded the "I Love Bees" phenom.
  
• Favorite expressions heard: (1) An Army gamed-based tutorial is called a "shootorial;" (2) "We don't want it to be a self-licking ice cream cone."
  

Game-specific Scripting Engines

A current CACM article recommends game-specific scripting engines. The authors (White, Koch, Gehrke, Demers) review current practice across game architects and find it wanting. Theirs are well-considered suggestions, though the game industry is quite fragmented and shows even less inclination to standardize than the standards-phobic software industry generally. For example, in a project to develop a game to teach computer network defense, we originally planned separate scripting engines to manage the network configuration / behavior and the vignettes. I still favor this approach, but there's little doubt that it would add a layer of initial design complexity that some believe is premature as the game's other requirements are still morphing.

The authors of "Better scripts, better games" are, though, well aware of the challenges this approach would face.

Performance is not the only reason for the runtime to monitor how the game changes over time; it is also useful for debugging. Debugging a game is not as simple as stepping through a single script. Each object is scripted individually,and these scripts can interact with one another in subtle ways. An incorrect data value in one script may be the result of an error in a completely different script. In addition, many errors are the result of user input that is not always easy to reproduce. A script designer needs some way of visualizing which scripts modify which objects and how these objects change over time.

• A CiteULike entry for this paper

GameTech Conference via Second Life

A common apology is that people "Do as I say, not as I do." So it may be said of many training conferences, which are held in ways not conducive to learning. Let this not be said of the Defense GameTech and Connections Conference 2009, to be held in the military training capital of the world (allowing for some hyperbole), Orlando, this month. On this occasion, the conference organizing are allowing for selected Second Life avatar-enabled folk to participate virtually. This is clearly a case of taking the technology to heart - with all the attendant risk and anticipated technical hurdles, great and small. Whatever the result, this is a laudable attempt by organizers.