Mission Critical Operator, the Virtual Heroes game for Wake Tech

A mission critical facility is any operation whose interruption hurts business, from lost revenue to legal trouble and, in extreme cases, loss of life. Data centers, hospitals, laboratories, public safety centers and military installations all qualify. Mission critical operators are the people who keep such buildings online and guard against failures.

Wake Tech Community College was developing a curriculum in mission critical operations in response to demand for that workforce. The program covers infrastructure development and maintenance, information security, mission critical communications and emergency operations.

Virtual Heroes designed and built a 3D game for the course. It is set in two fictitious mission critical facilities and plays in the first person for a single player, on Windows PCs and on the ARA browser-based Go platform. Players identify the key components of a facility, study how equipment fails and learn maintenance procedures. They answer alarms, walk to the equipment rooms and drill down to resolve incidents. The game plugs into the college's learning management system as a supplement to the course.

The point of the exercise is practice with best-practice steps for troubleshooting an incident. Graduates of the program are meant to be qualified to address breaches, respond to them as they happen and prevent or limit the damage that follows. The game gives students a place to rehearse that work before they touch real equipment.

Virtual Heroes is online as a division of Applied Research Associates (ARA) and describes its work as high-performance simulations for high-stakes training in commercial, government and military, and medical settings. It says it designs, develops and deploys high-fidelity simulations that blend training development, advanced modeling and serious gaming technology, and its menus lead to capabilities in modeling and simulation and in training, plus a portfolio, case studies and a page on history and awards. The page that once described Mission Critical Operator in its portfolio now forwards to the studio's home page, and the games directory lists the game as unconfirmed.

The curriculum the game was made for has a wider public description. The North Carolina Community College System presents mission critical operations as a course of study that prepares students to maintain technically sophisticated systems for business continuity and near continuous uptime, with coursework in electromechanical systems, networking, automation, cybersecurity, emergency management and systems integration. Its page names Cleveland Community College as the campus.