ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE
April 30, 2007
By Christopher Harz

Christopher Harz looks at the fundamental change that may be occurring in online game development, with implications for game producers, players and toolset developers.

One of the common themes in recent Serious Games conferences is that many game designers are out of touch with their audience, the players or end users of their games. Surprisingly, this theme has also been echoed at entertainment game expos, as major gaming gurus spoke of designers thinking that they "know too much" -- that they design games for themselves rather than for the users. No less a person than Phil Harrison, president of Sony Computer Ent., called for a fundamental shift in online gaming, to games that were oriented to -- and heavily influenced by -- the user. "It's about community. It's about collaboration. It's about customization. It's about emergent entertainment powered by the audience, with the audience at the center of this universe," he noted at the recent GDC.

Designing a game (in either serious or entertainment genres) with heavy user involvement runs counter to the conventional wisdom, which calls for essentially finishing a game design and then -- and only then -- releasing a "beta" version for actual users to try out; the earlier "alpha" version is usually only tested with an in-house audience. By the time the game is at the beta stage it is mere months before "shipping gold" (sending the master to the DVD factory), far too late to incorporate any significant user input.

Designing a game of the type that Harrison and others are calling for involves a radical shift in thinking for much of the game community, a change that can be painful but could also engender a lot of success and new opportunities. Rather than use the cliché term of "shifting" paradigms to describe such a change, let's use the gaming term of "power-up" -- a gain in capability that can change everything that was once familiar. We need a paradigm power-up.

So what does a Serious Game that was evolved with user interaction look like? How do you actually get to the stated goal of "community, collaboration, customization?" To get some answers, let's look at three games that are successful (that is, that are actually being used by user communities to learn and train with), to see what we can learn from them. They are: America's Army, Tactical Iraqi and Hazmat: Hotzone (which has now been renamed Code3D).

Tactical Iraqi is a language game initially developed for the U.S. military to teach Arabic. Dr. Lewis Johnson was the pm at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC ISI), where it was first developed, and is now ceo of Tactical Language Training LLC, a startup company in the Los Angeles area. The game, based on the Unreal Tournament game engine, introduces the player into social settings in Iraq, where he learns and tries out both the Arabic language and his understanding of the various social symbols, gestures and cultural habits of that country. Players "win" the game by speaking and behaving correctly in different evolving social situations with computer generated Arab characters, who can quickly turn hostile if the player makes such gaffes as forgetting to introduce himself properly before asking questions or pronouncing Arabic terms incorrectly.

The game is in wide usage by the military, especially by the Marine Corps and units of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM). Before the game came into usage, U.S. soldiers discovered to their dismay that they did not understand local gestures and cultural attitudes in Iraq, and no one there spoke the classical Arabic that they had been taught -- the effect was like trying to speak Shakespearean English in downtown Brooklyn.

Tactical Iraqi was developed with the user community from the outset. "The feedback and support that we received from the Marine Corps and Special Forces were essential to the game's success," said Johnson. "We were trying out so many new things -- speech evaluation, an in-game AI-generated instructor, recognition of facial gestures -- that we could not afford to come to the end of the development and discover we had made major mistakes. We released prototype versions of the game to users as soon as we could, and listened to and recorded their feedback."

Close interaction between the design and users groups necessitates getting to know each other's terminology and habits. In order that his team understood the "language" of the users, Johnson took them along to real-life training exercises. "Our whole team went out in the field, to the 29 Palms Marine Corps base, to the Ft. Irwin Army training facility, and elsewhere, so that we could experience live role playing in areas that replicated the environment that the game would be used for," he said. "We also sat in on classes, to understand the role of the instructor within the learning community."

The design approach considered the role of the instructor to be paramount. Although the game can be played by a single user, the team made sure that it could be used in a normal class, with the instructor as facilitator. When the game is being used in the field, where a live instructor is not available, the user is guided by a type of in-game instructor, a game-created character driven by AI (Artificial Intelligence). Creating the software to support this "intelligent tutor" was one of the game team's most challenging (and expensive) tasks, but illustrates the primary role bestowed upon the instructors by the team.

In addition to getting "face-to-face" with actual users, the team also used experts that were conversant in both gaming and military training -- the use of such "agents" allowed review of very early versions of the game, where serious "holes" in the game might have confused users. Such experts also were able to clear up occasional misunderstandings between the designer and user communities, and helped the designers avoid wasting time on aspects which were not important to the military users.

A Serious Game of this type, where errors in the game could lead players to get killed, has special requirements for training accuracy. "An entertainment game can be successful without being successful for every user," noted Johnson. "Serious Games don't have that luxury. We can't be satisfied if half the users really dive into it and half think it's a waste of time. We have to get the support of the whole community, even from users who are not really experienced gamers. We had to take into account what the barriers for newbies were, and how they could be overcome. A lot of designers and gamers have disdain for newbies -- 'We don't need no stinkin' help system in our game!' Our perspective was different. We had to make sure all of the users were able to get into the game, that they did not get overwhelmed and quit. To make sure of that, we needed early and consistent feedback." The design team asked for numerical feedback from early testers. "When we got predominantly 4s (on a scale of 5) we knew we were in the right ballpark," Johnson commented. "It meant that they liked it and felt it was needed, but could be better with specific improvements."

The design method used by Johnson to get closer to the users and what they needed is called "iterative prototyping." This involves generating a rough prototype, evaluating it with players or player representatives, incorporating changes into the next version, and then getting player feedback again, in a process involving several cycles. This method stands in marked contrast to the normal production method, sometimes called a "waterfall" approach, in which game design proceeds in linear fashion, with no user inputs until the very end. A review of many of the game design books available will reveal that many of them barely consider prototyping, reserving it for an initial build to be reviewed only by the design team, and do not even mention an iterative development approach involving users such as was used by Johnson's team.

Being able to understand what game features users really need is paramount to this process. "If you simply ask users what they want in a game, they will carefully list for you every feature of the real world that they know," said Dr. Bob Jacobs, an architect of SIMNET, a networked simulator system that was developed in close cooperation with users. "For instance, F-16 pilots will list every gauge and dial in the cockpit, whether you need it for a particular training task or not. You have to find out what users really need, what features are most important to them." Finding out which environmental features are important, and which ones can be downplayed or omitted, is another important part of the prototyping and feedback process.

"Having a concrete instance of the game allowed us to determine what the users considered to be authentic," noted Johnson. "Items specific to the community, such as uniforms, markings of ranks and badges for units, for instance, were really a BIG issue, and had to be generated precisely in the game. We spent a lot of effort getting modes of address correct -- when to say 'Sergeant,' for instance, and when to say, 'Sir.' Other aspects, such as what types of cars were driving down the streets in Baghdad, were considered less important, and could be simplified."

Authenticity remained a number-one concern throughout. For instance, whereas some designers might have considered having the user type in his communications in the game as "good enough," the Tactical Iraqi team not only assured that the game accepted live speech, but that the actual pronunciation of the speech be recognized and evaluated. It should be noted that the need for authenticity was toned down occasionally. "We found we had to relax some of the authentic features for the beginners' levels," Johnson mentioned. "We found that for starting players, the game had to be more forgiving. For instance, the characters in the game had to be more tolerant of mistakes in speech or pronunciation for beginners. As the players advance, the realism and mission challenges advance as well."

Further development of the game is now being conducted by Tactical Language Training LLC. Improvements this summer will include the ability for the player to take on different roles within the game, and the ability for multiple characters to hold multiple conversations. The company is also developing a game to learn French, in two modes, one for sub-Saharan Africa (for military usage) and one for civilian users doing business in France. The civilian version is not intended for just lollygagging in Paris. "We've found that students learn much better when they have a purpose in a game, just as is spelled out in Professor Jim Gee's book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy," noted Johnson. "Our French game will consist of learning around a business-oriented mission, with urgency and motivation involved."

In the meantime, interaction with the user community of Tactical Iraqi is still going on, even though the game is finished. "Getting the users involved early on has made them stakeholders in the game," according to Johnson. "They now send us comments and suggestions for changes, and we will continue to issue game mods and upgrades incorporating these. This is also important because the situation on the ground in Iraq is changing. Getting ongoing user feedback keeps our game fresh and current." The game has the ability to capture speech and player behavior, enabling the design team to analyze user movements and interactions after gameplay has concluded.

If Tactical Language can generate a game that makes learning Arabic fun -- considering what a difficult language that is to learn -- I can hardly wait to see what they can do for a language such as French. The days of mindlessly repeating La plume de ma tante est sur la table may be over forever.

Hazmat: Hotzone, originally developed by the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University is a game to teach firefighters how to deal with crisis situations involving hazardous materials such as poisonous gases or radioactive materials. Like Tactical Iraqi, this game was developed using the Unreal game engine. The success of Hazmat: Hotzone led its development group to split off and form a company, Sim Ops Studios, in the Pittsburgh area.

The game was developed in tight interaction with the Fire Department of New York, with the design team spending time in both firehouses and at the FDNY Training Academy. "We really got to know the firefighter community well, learned what great people there are in this community, and how much firefighters need and appreciate training," said Shanna Tellerman, ceo of Sim Ops Studios. "We started very early in the design process by having the users try out early prototypes -- we called them betas, but they were really more pre-alpha versions of the game. The feedback from the firefighters was essential, as we were unsure of which of the many possible features we could put into the game were really considered essential."

Tellerman's team used the design process of iterative prototyping, and videotaped each step in the process, including gameplay by the firefighters and after-game briefings between the design and user groups. The user feedback was incorporated into the next version of the game, and the cycle was repeated. Using this method enabled the designers to get practical feedback on what was important to the users. For instance, details of the uniforms and ranks were considered to be vital, and had to be carefully replicated. Similarly, an early digital model of the New York subway environment was considered "too clean" to be realistic -- it needed some trash for it to appear real. On the other hand, firefighters did not care whether the subway had turnstiles or not, so that detail could be omitted.

Hazmat: Hotzone is a gaming environment wherein a firefighter team enters a crisis situation and learns decisionmaking and other skills in resolving the crisis. A typical emergency involves a crisis in the New York subway, where chlorine gas has been released, with attendant civilian casualties. The players enter the subway environment in their simulated hazmat gear, and must function as a collaborative team in dealing with the incident.

The details of each scenario can be controlled by the facilitator, who is typically a hazmat expert or instructor at the fire academy. The game's GUI (Graphic User Interface) is simple enough that the facilitator need not be a gaming expert, but can generate a great many incident details for the training group, so they never need to see the same scenario twice. The role of the instructor is key -- the game development team stresses that they are trying to help and augment, not replace, instructors for firefighters.

Support of newbies is part and parcel of the game. The instructor can adjust game parameters to make the crisis challenges easier if the entire group is new, and can assure that newbies don't get confused by game controls as they enter the game. Often, however, the group is a mix of the new and the experienced, and the game must remain challenging enough even for the senior members. In such a situation, the newbies learn from the experts, and the experts must take account of the newbs -- just as is the case in real life situations. The community of firefighters typically draws closer from the learning experience of the game - it becomes a shared enterprise for this group of professionals, who know that their lives may depend upon the success of their learning as a group that can function and collaborate together.

Sim Ops Studios has now renamed Hazmat: Hotzone and its new moniker is Code3D, which is being released for nationwide sale and use on May 15, 2007. It is similar to Hazmat: Hotzone in that it is oriented to firefighters, but covers more types of training, and offers an even stronger toolset to instructors or facilitators. Instead of using Unreal, this game uses the Panda 3D engine, which allows the facilitator more graphic manipulation of game elements as he/she sets up each scenario.

Code3D was also developed in close cooperation with firefighters, this time not just with one group, but with 20 Fire Department and Emergency Response sites nationwide. "The unprecedented aspect of this game is the ease with which instructors can adapt it for their specific training requirements," Tellerman noted. "Instead of paying someone $50,000 or $100,000 to adapt it for them, they can do it themselves. They can build the basic 3D environment, select different types of hazards, insert people, and insert vehicles such as tanker trucks that can move around and even crash and burst into flame. They can speed up or slow down the time line, and go back to a point in time to proceed differently. They can pause the game if they want to make a point, and show the scene from different camera angles."

The instructors do not have to generate their own scenarios, as the game comes with a library of pre-built scenarios. However, it is expected that most instructors will want to "tweak" the basic scenarios, and will use these set-ups more as templates. Enabling non-animators to in essence build their own game levels took an extraordinary amount of GUI development. "Whereas Hazmat: Hotzone's GUI is simple to use, it is still primarily text based," noted Tellerman. Code3D is really graphic, around 75% of the elements on the control screen are actual graphic elements in the 3D world, and the user has the ability to manipulate an element such as a fire truck, turn it around, change it by putting different placards or signs on the truck, insert it into the environment, and then preview what the final setup would look like."

Getting feedback from users with succeeding prototypes elucidated what elements were considered essential to authenticity for this community. "Anything that related to the community's traditions or artifacts was highly important," Tellerman said. "We had to render six different helmet types accurately, with proper coloring, as well as three different uniform types, with proper badges and ranks." The technique also helped fine tune some expectations, and avoid unpleasant surprises. "We had believed that people in a scenario could be moved from one point in time to another, from one physical point to another, with no "tweening" (intermediate movements between the two physical points) necessary, but that proved to be wrong -- the users insisted on it.

On the other hand, they did not care about a 100% perfect walk cycle -- where the person's feet perfectly meet the floor as in real life, so we were able to compromise on that. What the users prioritized was often a surprise. But we were able to draw this out early by getting the response from the prototypes. This also helped us greatly with the GUI, in identifying parts that were difficult to use." Tellerman definitely recommends the prototype-with-users approach. "As painful as it feels -- get your prototype into users' hands as early as you can, even if there are still rough parts," she noted.

User interaction will continue even after Code3D is released. The company will continue to ask for and examine user feedback and suggestions, and expects the user community to react enthusiastically, especially since the users are "stakeholders" in the game -- they have a personal stake in its continued relevance and utility. Whereas Sim Ops will offer future upgrades for the game, Tellerman also expects that a cottage industry may develop for local animation houses -- to develop photorealistic buildings, landmarks and other features that are specific to a particular fire department's locale and that can be inserted into the game.

America's Army is a multiplayer online game that is in wide usage, both as a PR tool for the Army (in its popular version, which is available as a free download, and has registered over eight million users) and as an actual training tool for soldiers (where it can be played up to the Secret level). The civilian version of the game can be downloaded for free from the America's Army site and it is also available for the Sony PlayStation 2 and the Xbox.

America's Army was also involved with extensive interaction with the user communities, especially Army Infantry and Special Forces. According to Dr. Michael Capps, exec producer, the design and production team spent a lot of time at Ft. Benning, the Army Infantry School, as well as at other bases, firing Army weapons, operating Army vehicles, and interacting with real Army personnel. The initial production team, housed at the MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, also worked tightly with military training experts with dual knowledge of both games and Army requirements, who served as intermediate agents between the design and user communities, according to Dr. Michael Zyda, who was director of the Institute.

Again, tight interaction with users enabled the design team to determine what game features were necessary to appear authentic to Army users, and what features could be compromised in order to reduce rendering times and speed up gameplay. Generating prototypes and getting user feedback played a major role in game development, as did thorough up-front planning, according to Zyda.

The project's initial goal was to give inclined young Americans an idea of what life in the military is really like, in the hope of arousing their interest and making them more comfortable with the idea of enlisting, and to give the American public a better image of the Army in general. The initial America's Army offered two different modes of play. In the Soldiers mode, the player guides his character through an Army career by setting personal values, resources, and goals, beginning in basic training, then moving on to through Airborne and Sniper School on the way to becoming an Army Ranger.

The more action oriented (and more popular) Operations mode allowed players to take the first-person roles of skilled soldiers in the field to accomplish a variety of missions. Each player must work as part of a team -- teams that do not collaborate usually fail. The player character's particular role in his unit is determined by such factors as his leadership ability and MOS (Military Occupational Specialty).

The game offers extensive support to newbies (unlike many other games, which throw them right into the fray). New players get extensive help in getting introduced into the skills and traditions of the group. Pre-mission briefs give a clear explanation of what is expected for each mission. The professional version of the game, used by the troops, also has post-mission briefs with experts that explain what happened, and what went right and what needs improvement.

Having started as a PR vehicle for the Army, the game evidenced such a level of realism that a form of it is now being used for actual training for the U.S. troops. The game's success has also led to the genesis of a new group, the America's Army Government Applications office, which opened in Cary, North Carolina, where it has easy access to a number of Special Operations bases in the area, as well as to the home of Epic, which makes the Unreal engine that powers the game, and which continues to offer major support in continued improvement in the game software. The Government Applications Group is evolving new forms of the game for training other parts of the government, such as the Secret Service and the IC (Intelligence Community).

Capps, now the ceo of Epic Games, producer of the award-winning Gears of War and Unreal Tournament games, continues to be a strong believer in a tight partnership between the designer and user communities, which should continue even after the game has shipped. He noted, "We've always benefited from user-created content; our map/mod community keeps our game alive on shelves long after we've finished. We also release multiplayer betas for user feedback. MMOs like America's Army certainly benefit from user feedback long before release, with their extended beta periods. Ongoing feedback is the reason we, Blizzard, Bioware, and many others spend so much time and effort on community websites and forums."

Zyda is now the director of the USC GamePipe Lab in the Los Angeles area, where he teaches new generations of game producers in successful game technology and design techniques.

Winning Game Design Elements

It appears that there is a lot to learn from these successful games, which really stand out in a field where failure (non-adoption by the user community) appears to be the rule rather than the exception. Much of the design philosophy in these three games appears to be remarkably strong and consistent, and runs counter to the design approaches of many Serious Game production groups -- and, as Michael Capps noted, many of these design principles should be used by multiplayer entertainment games, as well.

The most obvious common factor is that all three games considered the game creation process to be a partnership between the design and user communities, with the designers going far out of their way to live with, eat with (and drink with!) and learn with the users in their native setting. Designers also paid a great deal of attention to authenticity, as perceived by the users. They found that authenticity does not equate with reality, and that it can be really surprising to learn what elements users consider to be necessary for an environment or story element to appear "real" to them -- a real danger for designers, who had to overcome their own prepossessions as to what constituted such a perceived reality.

The designers of these games also had a great deal of respect for the users as a community, and assured that they could learn together as a group, not just as a collection of individuals. Support to the community included enabling authentic ways to communicate among its members, high-resolution rendering of important community traditions and artifacts such as uniforms and badges of rank, and the collection of common knowledge as it was created. One means of identifying and validating such knowledge was by post-mission debriefing sessions, called "After Action Reviews" by the military, where players review and reflect on what they have learned, usually in the presence of an expert who serves as a facilitator for the group. All three games acknowledged the role of such an expert, whether live (in an actual classroom) or simulated in-game (by AI, in Tactical Iraqi). The games also made use of one or more intermediary agents, who could understand both "userspeak" and "gamespeak" and were thus able to function in both worlds, thereby avoiding many translation mistakes.

Interestingly, there is an academic theory of learning that systematically describes the above aspects as being necessary for learning by a group of professionals -- not just the firefighter and military communities targeted here, but by any group of professionals that functions and learns together. This form of social learning theory is termed "Communities of Practice," or CoPs, and is described in Wenger's Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge Press, 1998), and in many other books and research reports, which describe the social, psychological and anthropological underpinnings of what is necessary to make a community "tick" either in real life or in a gaming environment.

One of the hallmarks of a CoP is that it can be very specific, that is, that its traditions can be very local, down at the level of a specific firehouse or military unit, making it all the more important to enlist such users in the design process, because no game production team could customize a game to that level by itself -- as all three teams confirmed, such customization would bankrupt any game budget.

In order to achieve the above objectives, these design teams used the strategy of rapid interactive prototyping, rather than the straight linear development process that is far more popular. This approach can be "painful," as one designer mentioned, and can lead to many radical changes in assumptions and design at an early stage. But all three teams voiced a unanimous opinion of, "Better early than later." Feedback from users at the very early stages avoided a lot of unpleasant surprises at the beta stage, when it was usually too late to make any major changes to the game.

All three teams chose to personally witness and document the release of each prototype as end users were trying it out, to mark how well it did and get user appraisals. "Documentation" in this case did not mean the very extensive (and time consuming) formal write-ups that government bureaucracy usually demands in a training development process, but consisted of much more informal note taking and videotaping of group sessions, with the use of screen capture tools such as FRAPS or 3D in-game recording (when possible) to record gameplay from the user's point of view.

It is also interesting to note that all three teams did not consider this partnership to be over upon game completion, but planned for ongoing feedback from the users, especially users that were involved in the original development, with provision for incorporating such feedback into future game upgrades.

Userware and New Toolsets for Game Development

Tools to enable the modification or even the creation of game levels are nothing new. Will Wright pioneered much of this capability with his Sims family of games, each of which is basically a game about creating a game. Modding a game (changing the game's characters and environment) has been around for quite a while -- many expert players are so used to modding games, especially First Person Shooters, that they refer to un-modded games as "Vanilla" versions, or "V" for short, such as VQ3 (Vanilla Quake 3). Persistent worlds such as Second Life have taken user involvement to new levels -- users within the Second Life environment commonly modify their avatars, clothing and equipment. Hundreds of stores exist in-world that sell everything from clothing, cars, furniture and elaborate houses to animation cycles such as fancy dance moves.

However, it would be wrong to think that such user-oriented software is common or really easy to use. Users are usually limited to small modifications of library objects, such as changing the color of hair or of a pair of jeans. Most serious modding is reserved for very experienced players who have some familiarity with professional animation tools. Even the creation of objects in Second Life requires at least semi-professionals, sometimes called prosumers, for modeling using either the in-game scripting language or a Poser-style toolset (a means to import Maya-created objects is now available).

The availability of a user-oriented toolset such as that in Code3D raises the bar considerably, by allowing users to really customize a game for their specific application. The advantage to a Serious Game such as Code3D is obvious -- customizing a firefighter game for the thousands of fire departments across America -- each of which has its own "Community of Practice" traditions and requirements -- could bankrupt any game production company very quickly. The best approach -- perhaps the only workable approach -- for a game oriented towards many local communities is to have each one of those user communities capable of doing its own customization.

Sony's new PlayStation Home online system is attempting to generate this type of user-oriented toolset for the players in its new persistent online world, so that the players can make more and more of what is becoming known as "emergent" content. What Sony is proposing with its Home is a really new possibility: modifying games, or even creating brand new ones, by communities of ordinary players, to express their creativity -- and have an excuse for getting together. Even beginning players can choose from easy tools to modify library objects, including furniture and pets. They can also create actual games of their own, and Sony will highlight the most popular games in the online world, similar to what YouTube does with the most popular videos on its site.

Home also allows the trading of games and game objects, as well as the importation of objects from the real world, such as photos of players that can be inserted into frames and hung on the walls of virtual apartments.

Sony's software is based on an Autodesk toolset that evolved from Maya. Autodesk is now looking at the new area of user-oriented software, tentatively called "userware," and I expect that we will see many new developments along this line from the company in the near future.

One of the ways that Sony is financing its ongoing support of Home users is by in-game advertising, and this may also be a venue for Serious Game producers to keep up their relationships with user communities, in addition to the more normal monthly subscription fees and charges for upgrades.

Summary

It appears that a lot can be learned from a review of successful Serious Games, with implications that may even extend to multiplayer entertainment games. The leaders that directed the design of these games clearly had specific approaches in mind, including an ongoing partnership with users that started almost at the beginning of game development and continued on long after shipping of the DVDs, an intentional recognition of and respect for the traditions and dynamics of the communities being trained, the inclusion into the game for means to support that community in how it functioned, and the use of rapid prototyping -- rather the more comfortable and secretive approach of keeping all development in-house until almost the very end. The academic community appears to have valuable insights into the care and feeding of game communities, especially a form of social learning called Communities of Practice, which explains many of the underlying needs that a community in a game environment must have in order to function properly.

The approach of enjoining a partnership between designer and user communities may have an additional benefit that is not yet fully appreciated by the Serious Games community. All three of the design teams spoke of how involved the users became in a game after they helped design it, as they had become stakeholders in its success. They also spoke of the impossibility of customizing a game for the thousands of small user groups (firehouses, police stations, college classrooms) that all want the game "their way," à la Burger King. One of the major markets that presently uses almost no games of any kind to teach is the K-16 field, of schools and colleges.

A major reason given for this is that teachers -- who generally have a major role in determining books and lesson plans -- have been resistant to games, that they feel afraid of them and out of control. Getting them involved in customizing the game (if an in-game toolset is easy enough for them to use) could override this fear, and make them accept learning games as stakeholders. This would open up a huge market, for millions of teachers worldwide.

The call for closer partnership with users seems to be getting echoed by the entertainment game community, with a new respect for user generated content, both because users seem capable of generating it and because the ability to create such content -- especially as a community -- turns the users from passive consumers of the game into stakeholders, and makes a game site much more sticky and the community much more robust. The formation of such robust communities is vital to the acceptance and survival of online games, as companies such as Sony have learned.

The field of game design needs more pioneering teams such as the creator of these three games. It also needs a new generation of toolsets, userware to support user generated modification and generation of content, simple enough to use for everyday game players (or even school teachers). With such design approaches, which could turn the designer/user dance into a partnership rather than a guessing game, and the tools to enable the players to be full partners, we may see a new generation of games in the very near future, one that turns Sony's wish list of "community, collaboration, customization" into a reality. This would be great fun for entertainment games, and could literally be a life saver for the users of new generations of Serious Games that are badly needed sooner rather than later -- for firefighters, policemen, physicians and emergency response personnel, and the many others that work hard to try and keep us safe.

Christopher Harz is an exec consultant for new media. He has produced videogames for films such as Spawn, The Fifth Element, Titanic and Lost in Space. As Perceptronics svp of program development, Harz helped build the first massively multiplayer online game worlds, including the $240 million 3-D SIMNET. He worked on C3I, combat robots and war gaming at the RAND Corp., the military think tank.

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