Via: Polygon - PAX East 2013: All The Games
And News, Live From Boston
Polygon
reports that five scientists from the Lincoln Lab hosted a panel at PAX East 2013
to discuss the growing use of "Serious Games" as tools to assist in solving
national security problems, which is the center's primary purview (please find
also Game Technologies for Homeland Security Training).
The panelists' discussion centered on the
applications games have for the kinds of issues that the Lincoln Lab is
tackling, as well as some of the unique challenges the creators of such games
face.
The
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Lab, a federally funded
research and development center, focuses on real-world problem solving through
applications of technology and that technology now includes video games.
Here are
the article highlights:
According
to Polygon’s website, Adam Norige, technical staff for homeland security at
Lincoln Lab, said that a major application for games is in evaluating an
official's decision-making and problem-solving skills. He gave the example of
managing a California wildfire — specifically, of the quick thinking required
in such a situation.
Tim Dasey, group leader for decision support technologies, pointed out that real-world decision making is almost never digitally captured, so there's little data from actual situations that researchers can analyze.
That's where games come in.
The idea,
said cognitive scientist Erik Schlicht, is to use games as tools "to build
quantitative models that predict the decisions
that people make based on the information we provide in the game."
"If
you don't exhaustively recreate the real-world environment, you could argue
that the actions they take in the gaming environment differ from the actions
they take in the operational environment," said Schlicht. "And so the
challenge becomes, how do you use novice data in this low-fidelity simulation
environment to predict operational behavior in this high-fidelity setting?"
The
"low-fidelity" part can be a big stumbling block. As
government-funded games, these simulations don't have the massive budgets that
are afforded to AAA titles.
"If
you look at the Serious Games space," said Norige, discussing middleware
and game engines, "most of the tools out there that assist with building
these games, they don't exist." And 3D environments "may not even be
a component of some of these games," Norige added. That's because, as
Dasey pointed out, typical 3D games such as first-person experiences are poorly
suited to representing the kinds of situational data and decision making that
the researchers are trying to analyze through their games.
For those
reasons, making games seem real isn't actually what the Lincoln Lab developers
shoot for — "the target that we go for is plausible," said Norige.
Once that goal is reached, the players become immersed in the experience, even
if there isn't a lifelike 3D world surrounding them.
About Lincoln Laboratory
As a
Department of Defense Research and Development Laboratory, MIT Lincoln
Laboratory conducts research and development aimed at solutions to problems
critical to national security.
The areas
that constitute the core of the work performed at Lincoln Laboratory are
sensors, information extraction (signal processing and embedded computing),
communications, and integrated sensing and decision support, all supported by a
broad research base in advanced electronics.
Two of the
Laboratory’s principal technical objectives are (1) the development of
components and systems for experiments, engineering measurements, and tests
under field operating conditions and (2) the dissemination of information to
the government, academia, and industry.
Lincoln
Laboratory also undertakes government-sponsored, nondefense projects in areas
such as the development of systems the Federal Aviation Administration relies
on to improve air-traffic control and air safety, systems that the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses in weather surveillance, and
systems the National Aeronautics and Space Administration employs in its space
science missions.