Serious games: virtual reality’s second coming?

Abstract

The 1980s and 1990s were marked by a series of important events in the history of interactive computer graphics. Significant evolutions in real-time hardware and software prompted the launch of a number of ‘‘movements’’ throughout the globe, including computer-generated imagery and animation (e.g. for the film and TV industries), scientific visualisation, Virtual Reality and wearable computing. Whilst these groups did much to bring a range of unique technologies to the attention of a much wider global audience than ever before, they were also responsible for creating a culture of myth, hype and false promise. This was particularly the case for VR. From the perspective of potential adopters throughout many commercial sectors (including defence and medicine), VR delivered a roller coaster ride of achievement and failure throughout the 1990s. Factors such as commercial naivety on the part of VR companies, significant failures to deliver meaningful and usable intellectual property on the part of so-called academic ‘‘centres of excellence’’, expensive and unreliable hardware, an absence of case studies with cost-benefit analyses and a widespread absence of attention to the requirements and limitations of the end users, all took their toll by the end of the 1990s. However, long before the late 1980s, when VR broke free from its NASA and Department of Defense ‘‘shackles’’, the future potential of computer games to solve the accessibility and affordability problems of modelling and rendering tools for ‘‘serious’’ interactive 3D applications had already been recognised. Battlezone—a wireframe tank game published in 1983 for the Atari—represented a true breakthrough in the exploitation of games technology for part-task training. Less well remembered, but representing a major step forward in interactive 3D was The Colony—an excellent first-person space survival game created in 1988 for the Apple Macintosh by David Smith (who was also accredited with developing the first VRML Internet tool kit in 1995). Smith’s game development software, which was commercialised as a 3D toolkit (Virtus WalkThrough) when he founded the Virtus Corporation in 1990, was subsequently modified for use as a virtual scene planning tool for the science fiction film The Abyss and later formed the basis of a relationship with Tom Clancy that was to spawn such memorable titles as SSN and Rainbow Six. From the late 1990s, the ‘‘serious games’’ community steadily built up significant momentum, exploiting the powerful software underpinning such games as the Unreal, Quake and Half-Life series, Operation Flashpoint, FarCry and many more. Much has been written about serious games, particularly with regard to the future of gaming in simulation and training. It is generally accepted that they are games with ‘‘a purpose’’—games that go beyond entertainment to deliver engaging learning experiences across a wide range of sectors. Since 2005, it is fair to say that, whilst serious games still have some way to go before conclusive statements can be made as to their training efficacy (promoting positive skills or knowledge transfer and minimising skill fade, for example), their appearance on the technologybased training stage in many countries has, in the main, met with surprisingly positive receptions. This is despite the fact that the term ‘‘serious games’’ seems to have attracted as many opponents as proponents and there still exists a good population of sceptics who are still recovering from R. Stone (&) Human Interface Technologies Team, School of Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK e-mail: r.j.stone@bham.ac.uk