Alternative uses - The play's the thing
http://www.economist.com/node/21541159What video-game technology can do in the real world
Dec 10th 2011 | from the print edition
A DECADE AGO the computer industry was abuzz with talk about "virtual
reality" that would allow the construction of convincing digital
facsimiles of the real world. As it turns out, the games industry has
come quite close to delivering this. Modern games use cheap hardware
and software to create three-dimensional worlds with convincing
textures and lighting, objects that obey real-world laws of physics
and realistic sounds. Such worlds are constructed mostly to allow
players to race fantasy cars across them or defend them from invading
aliens. But they also have more practical uses.
Codemasters is a British developer that specialises in driving games,
including a Formula One racing simulator. Its fans demand a faithful
recreation of the experience, says Rod Cousens, its chief executive.
The firm's software can simulate real-world cars in almost every
detail, and the circuits within the game are true-to-life recreations
of racecourses such as Silverstone and Monza. When Formula One went to
India for the first time this year, the virtual version of the track
was ready before the real one; several drivers took advantage of his
company's software to practise. "We can recreate every aspect of the
track from data given to us by the F1 authorities", explains Mr
Cousens.
Warfare seems an obvious application for games technology. "Steel
Beasts", a tank-warfare simulation game developed by California-based
eSim Games, is reportedly being used by several Western armies. The
Canadian, British and Australian armed forces have experimented with
training their soldiers on "Virtual Battle Space 2", a tweaked version
of "Arma 2", a military wargame developed by Bohemia Interactive, a
Czech games firm. Players take on the role of an individual soldier
alongside dozens of other human allies or opponents. They can issue
commands to computer-controlled squadmates, fire virtual versions of a
variety of weapons used by armies around the world and drive tanks and
armoured vehicles, all in an environment of hundreds of square
kilometres that alternates between day and night and offers weather
effects such as fog and rain.
Armies have long used machines to simulate expensive bits of kit such
as jet fighters or tanks, says Peter Morrison, who runs the part of
Bohemia Interactive that focuses on the military market. But
simulating the experience of individual soldiers is something new.
Cost apart, his products offer other advantages over the real world.
If a commander wants his troops to practise infantry combat in the
fog, he does not have to wait for the weather to oblige; he can
conjure it up on his computer.
Satellite images and geographical data can be fed into the software to
generate virtual representations of real places, allowing soldiers to
rehearse specific missions. "It's quite likely that the [American
special forces] team that killed Osama bin Laden would have rehearsed
the raid in some sort of virtual environment," says someone familiar
with the military-training business. And since everything the soldiers
do is recorded by their computers, data from the mission can be
analysed afterwards.
There are lots of other possibilities. In 2002 the United States army
released "America's Army", a game based on a commercial software
package used in dozens of straightforward consumer games, as a
recruitment tool. It has been downloaded millions of times and is
still played online.
Companies are getting interested too. Business-simulation games are
available for everyone from managers to call-centre workers and have
been used by companies from Coca-Cola to Shell. "Doing this sort of
business education as a game can make it more compelling than a
traditional chalk-and-blackboard approach," says Tim Luft, of the
Serious Games Institute, a research outfit in Coventry, England. His
researchers are working on virtual stores for a retail firm and a
three-dimensional computer version of the city of Coventry for use by
architects and planners in local government. "Big companies could
build this kind of software in-house," Mr Cousens concedes. "But why
would they? We've spent years and millions of dollars getting it just
right. It's easier to just buy it off the shelf."
Even as software written for the games industry is being put to
serious uses, the element of fun in games is being exploited through
the latest management tool, "gamification". This relies on working out
what makes video games enjoyable and applying the same techniques to
other kinds of activities, from running a business to tackling tricky
scientific problems. It may seem a strange notion, but there is
something in it. A good example comes from molecular biology—more
specifically, the quest to understand the way in which proteins fold.
Proteins are complicated chemicals made of long chains of amino acids,
the tiny chemical building blocks of life. Those chains can fold up in
billions of different ways, and the process by which they arrive at
the correct one is still poorly understood. It is vitally important,
because misfolded proteins either do not work at all or do things that
they shouldn't. Badly folded proteins are implicated in various forms
of cancer as well as neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and
Parkinson's.
Computers can recognise a well-folded protein when presented with one,
but actually finding it calls for the sort of pattern recognition and
lateral thinking that they struggle with. Scientists have tried to
deal with the problem by using enormous computing power to sift
systematically through billions of possible configurations. But in
2008 a team from the University of Washington tried a different
approach.
They released a program called "Foldit" that turned protein-folding
into a free online puzzle game. Players are presented with a protein
and given the task of finding its most energy-efficient shape by
fiddling with its structure. A better shape means a higher score;
dramatic progress is rewarded with lots of extra points, pleasing
sound effects and a little shower of virtual streamers. The controls
are simple and intuitive, and there are friendly tutorials to tell
novices what to do. Online leaderboards let players compare solutions
to foster competition.
By turning their problem into a game, the scientists have harnessed
thousands of human brains without specialist knowledge to work on
protein-folding, says Adrien Treuille, a computer scientist at the
University of Columbia who helped to develop the program. "We wanted a
toy," he says, "something so beautiful and such fun that you could
pick it up and start playing with it without any formal training."
Vital lessons were learned from professional games developers. "We
needed to have a very vivid representation of what was going on. We
needed an intuitive interface, and something called 'juiciness'—a game-
designer's term for lots of instant positive feedback."
"Foldit" and its 46,000-plus users have already made serious
contributions to biology. A paper published in the September issue of
Nature Structural and Molecular Biology shows that "Foldit" players
were better than any computer algorithm at modelling the structure of
a protein used by retroviruses such as HIV, which causes AIDS. And in
the best video-game tradition a sequel, called "EteRNA", is already in
the works. It will allow users to investigate RNA synthesis.
In business, gamification has become increasingly fashionable over the
past year or two. The point about games is that they make players want
to perform difficult tasks and pay for the privilege, says Brian Burke
of Gartner, a consultancy. Gamifiers try to capture that sense of
engagement by providing rapid, continuous feedback, a clear sense of
progression and goals that are challenging enough to maintain interest
but not so hard as to put players off. One example is FourSquare, a
social network (and rival to Facebook) that lets users post their
present location for their friends to see. Those who visit a
particular place (such as a restaurant or a pub) are given badges. The
most dedicated are awarded titles such as "Adventurer" (for ticking
ten separate locations) and may be crowned "mayor" of the place. A
text-based scoring system is keeping people engaged. Since its launch
in 2009 the service has picked up more than 10m users.
Easy, peasy
Another example comes from Britain's Department for Work and Pensions,
which is offering a gamified version of a suggestion box. Staff who
come up with ideas to improve the business are awarded points called
"DWPeas" that can be invested in promising suggestions made by other
people. If the boss gives the go-ahead, the investors get their points
back with interest, thus increasing their total. A leaderboard and a
"buzz index" provide the element of competition.
But not everyone is convinced. A lot of gamification efforts do not
seem to offer anything very different from the old rules of good
management. The motivating power of competition and leaderboards are
familiar to sales managers, who have had salesman-of-the-month
contests for many years. Games designers themselves say that the
emphasis on rewards and feedback systems may be missing the point: if
the job itself is tedious and repetitive, such bells and whistles can
come across as patronising. Mr Burke accepts this. "Gamification can
be powerful, but you have to use it carefully," he says. "A lot of
what's going on at the moment is driven by little more than novelty
and hype."
--
Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth. - Mohandas Gandhi
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