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`" Niantic's ExhibitNo. 1033
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`Niantic's Exhibit No. 1033
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`CREATING A SCIENCE
`OF GAMES
`
`The same technology that makes interactive
`3D games so entertaining in the physical action domain
`is just as effective in education, training, and other
`more serious applications.
`
`By MICHAEL ZYDA, Guest Editor
`
`The video game industry will grow to about $60 bil-
`
`lion in revenue this year [1], almost the size of the
`U.S. Department of Defense expenditure on
`research, development, testing, and evaluation [4].
`Game play has begun to surpass television viewing
`among some segments of the population [3].
`Video game development budgets are already the
`size of motion picture development budgets, on
`the order of $20 million to $100 million, with expected revenue for a hit game
`reaching from $250 million to more than $1 billion [2]. The world’s youth
`spends enormous numbers of hours inside games. Massively multiplayer online
`games involve millions of live, human players participating in virtual worlds of
`substantial complexity—in which individual games claim some 18,000 to more
`than 180,000 years of aggregate in-game play. Developers have also begun to
`
`!"
`
`" -
`
`Firescope, a real-time strategy incident-commander training game built for the Los Angeles Fire Department.
`(Fred Zyda, USC GamePipe Laboratory and USC Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism
`Events.)
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`create serious games that use immersive entertain-
`ment to further government or corporate training,
`education, health, public policy, or strategic com-
`munication objectives.
`How might video games provide any or even all
`K–12 science and math education in the U.S.? With
`so much play taking place and with video games
`becoming such a large part of the economy and of our
`everyday lives, it’s time to create a science of games to
`
`telling in service to society in the interactive realm. My
`crazy dream is that someday we’ll replace the educa-
`tion system everywhere with emotion-cognizant video
`games that children demand to play even in their spare
`time. Such games would be played with a sensor suite
`that provides a real-time stream of human-state data as
`input to the game. Games then become human-state
`aware and adapt directly to the live player, under-
`standing when the student is/is not learning, and with
`
`" -
`
`With so much play taking place and with video games
`becoming SUCH A LARGE PART OF THE ECONOMY and
`of our everyday lives, it’s time to create a science of games to
`help in the development of games and their future instantiations.
`
`!"
`
`help in the development of games and their future
`instantiations. We need to understand what is hap-
`pening at the game-human interface and provide edu-
`cational programs that produce graduates who are
`able to create the technologies critical to the future of
`the medium.
`The purpose of this special section is to share sig-
`nificant recent research and vision at the forefront of
`the creation of the new science. We link it directly
`with the field of computer science, as computing is the
`underlying required technology, even as we acknowl-
`edge that some of the science of games is beyond the
`traditional boundaries of computer science. But
`boundaries between disciplines are not immutable. In
`fact, the most interesting work in technology develop-
`ment is often cross-disciplinary. We begin with com-
`puting as a starting point and understand we will
`quickly transcend its nominal boundaries.
`My personal motivation for wanting to create a
`science of games is that the new gaming medium is
`still in the hands of risk-averse entertainment corpo-
`rations. We get great game entertainment from
`giants like Electronic Arts, Activision, and Sony but
`not much in the way of R&D or creativity, new gen-
`res, exploration of emotion-cognizant games, novel
`input devices, or rapid game development tools.
`Basically, we get Spider-Man n, Need for Speed n+1,
`and Grand Theft Auto n+2. By the way, these are
`great franchises, but there are entertainment genres
`beyond the physical action domain, and we need to
`explore and create them. The entertainment industry
`won’t do it on its own.
`The game industry also won’t explore the idea of
`serious games. There are, however, great reasons to
`want to understand how to deploy immersive story-
`
`28
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`July 2007/Vol. 50, No. 7 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
`
`what level of difficulty. With emotion-cognizant
`games, we might potentially reduce the school system
`to a tutoring service for questions and answers not yet
`
`incorporated into the online edusphere. Today’s game industry will not build
`
`a game-based learning infrastruc-
`ture on its own. It got killed in the
`early days
`of
`edutainment
`(2000–2004), and shareholder
`lawsuits continue to prevent game
`industry executives from attending
`conferences where the topic of
`games for education might be headlined. So, com-
`puter scientists must be responsible for making this
`happen and not wait for the risk-averse to come
`around.
`To be able to deploy the new medium for societal
`good, we need a well-defined R&D agenda. In [6],
`the GamePipe Laboratory at the University of South-
`ern California defined the basic research directions as
`infrastructure, cognition, immersion, and serious
`games. These directions continue to be valid. We also
`need educational programs that produce graduates
`who are able to engineer games, game designs, and
`next-generation technologies. The mix of articles here
`covers the gamut, from research to game development
`education to how to keep students in the field of
`computer science so we have a future at all.
`Merrilea J. Mayo of the National Academies looks
`into the learning literature on games, from their
`potential role in education to scientific studies of
`learning outcomes from games. Her citing the fact
`that “video games stimulate chemical changes in the
`brain that promote learning” should make us all
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`wonder why we are not already running toward a
`game-based education future. I truly want to augment
`(even replace) large parts of the education system with
`immersive games.
`To temper my enthusiasm for games for education,
`I sought out Ralph E. Chatham, a program manager
`at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to
`address the idea of games for military training. His
`mission is to determine whether games can play a role
`and, if so, what it should be. He dispels several myths
`about games for training, including that they are:
`cheap to create, deploy, and maintain; effective for
`training for the real world; trainerless, providing unsu-
`pervised learning; and work on just about any PC any-
`where. Nonetheless, he has persevered and has had
`great luck with games developed in his program,
`including the Tactical Language and Cultural Training
`System and DARWARS Ambush! He learned lesson
`number one in the games world—that the game wants
`the whole computer—and more than he could ever
`want to know about game engine licensing. His expe-
`rience should be studied by all government program
`managers thinking of becoming game developers.
`In parallel with DARPA’s effort, Henry Kelly et al.
`of the Federation of American Scientists joined with
`Brown University and the University of Southern
`California to create Immune Attack, a game
`designed to teach immunology to high school stu-
`dents and college freshmen. I asked him and his
`team to detail their experience working with game
`developers far-removed from their own disciplines,
`urging them to do it while their thoughts on trans-
`lating medical science to gameplay were fresh.
`Funded by the National Science Foundation,
`Immune Attack appears to be one of the first major
`NSF forays into game development.
`Randy Pausch and Don Marinelli of Carnegie Mel-
`lon University’s Entertainment Technology Center
`describe their two-year game-development master’s
`degree program. We include it here because other uni-
`versities may want to learn how to establish their own
`game development programs that could further be
`used as a basis for creating a science of games pro-
`gram. The Center is very different from traditional
`stovepipe university degree programs. Note, for exam-
`ple, that they view themselves as the Eating and Trav-
`eling Club. The network of contacts it generates is
`enormous, delivering a useful message to universities
`building such programs not directly associated with
`the game development industry.
`Caitlin Kelleher and Randy Pausch of Carnegie
`Mellon University reflect on how college freshmen in
`North America selecting computer science as their
`major dropped by 70% from 2000 to 2004 [5], dis-
`
`cussing how to motivate children’s interest in com-
`puter science through storytelling and game technolo-
`gies. We await the results of their effort but believe it
`is on the right track to meet future growth projections
`in the game-development domain or even have a
`game future at all.
`Finally, Nikunj Raghuvanshi et al. of the University
`of North Carolina at Chapel Hill explore the method-
`ology and techniques they’ve developed for synthesiz-
`ing physically based sounds in games and other virtual
`environments. Rather than using prerecorded, static
`sound files, the idea is to generate sounds from objects
`interacting based on their physical properties and on
`how collisions with the objects move the air around
`them. Despite this computationally demanding
`result, it takes only 10% of available CPU cycles. As
`game technology progresses, providing more and
`more immersive reality, we will continue to consume
`all available CPU cycles.
`
`CONCLUSION
`We hope these articles influence your personal
`research in the direction of games, helping you
`understand why computer science must be willing to
`support games’ R&D and societal missions. It’s been
`great fun for me to waylay these fellow games
`researchers and educators into sharing their ideas
`and insight. Their work represents initial steps on
`the continuum of research and education necessary
`to create the new science. With them, we position
`ourselves to begin to understand and repurpose this
`c
`vibrant interactive medium.
`
`References
`1. Carless, S. Informa predicts $58.4B game industry in 2007. Gamasutra (Oct.
`24, 2005); www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=6942.
`2. Olson, R. Blizzard talks ‘World of Warcraft.’ Red Herring (Jan. 15,
`2007); www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=20754&hed=Blizzard+
`Talks+%E2%80%98World+of+Warcraft%E2%80%99.
`3. Prentice, K. Reaching young gamers in the midst of their play. Media
`Life Magazine (Jan. 17, 2006); www.medialifemagazine.com/cgi-bin/art-
`man/exec/view.cgi?archive=170&num=2241.
`4. U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Historical Tables (Table 3.1.
`Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940–2009). In Budget of the
`U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2005, Washington, D.C., 2004, 45–52;
`www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/pdf/hist.pdf.
`5. Vegso, J. Drop in CS bachelor’s degree production. Computing Research
`News 18, 2 (Mar. 2006), 5.
`6. Zyda, M. From visual simulation to virtual reality to games. IEEE Com-
`puter 38, 9 (Sept. 2005); 25–32.
`
`Michael Zyda (zyda@usc.edu) is the director of the GamePipe
`Laboratory, a professor of engineering practice in the Department of
`Computer Science, and a staff member of the Information Sciences
`Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
`
`© 2007 ACM 0001-0782/07/0700 $5.00
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`Niantic's Exhibit No. 1033
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