One (Video Game) Controller to Rule Them All: Game Technology Invades the Military

Military reporters were buzzing this week about the new Universal Control System (UCS) from defense contractor Raytheon. The device is designed to control unmanned aerial vehicles (AEVs), and borrows liberally from videogame technologies.

Mark Scott from BusinessWeek reports from England:

On display at the biennial Farnborough Air Show in Britain, this next-generation ground control system for the likes of General Atomics’ Predator UAV has more in common with the Sony (SNE) PlayStation 3 than with the Northrop Grumman (NOC) F-14 Tomcat made famous by the classic 1980s movie Top Gun.

David Hambling over at Wired notes a variety of videogame technologies are finding their way into military applications.

- A Wii-mote controller is used for bomb disposal robots

- X-box contollers are used for piloting drones and robots

- The world’s fastest computer, to be used for nuclear simulations, is made using chips originally designed for gaming systems

- DARPA is developing technologies for ground forces from gaming chips that include radar, mapping, and tracking of enemy forces in real time while a soldier is in combat

References:
Hambline, D. (2008, July 19). Game controllers driving drones, nukes. [Online]. Retrieved July 20, 2008 from http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/07/wargames.html

Scott, M. (2008, July 16). Raytheon taps video games to pilot drones. BusinessWeek. [Online]. Retrieved July 20, 2008 from http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2008/
gb20080716_470794.htm

Humana Jumps Into Health Video Game Fray

A bandwagon seems to be forming among health insurers concerning serious medical video games. I blogged previously about Re-mission here and here. Recall that CIGNA was one of the major forces behind the Re-mission effort, partnering with HopeLab’s Pamela Omidyar, wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Now, it appears other major health insurance companies are poised to encourage development of video games that promote good health.

In particular, insurance leviathan Humana’s Integrated Consumer Experience Division is partnering with Digitalmill and Touchtown to develop and research health and exercise games. It appears from press coverage that students over at U. Southern California will do much of the coding. USC already has a strong relationship with DARPA surrounding military training games, and has deep roots in the Hollywood special effects crowd which is all computerized these days.

With both CIGNA and Humana now behind serious games in the health sector, look for increased development of products with low profit motivations, but high health ed expectations. Results will be measured in fitness rather than bucks. Hopefully some good research will come out of these efforts as well.

References
Business Courier of Cincinnati. (2007, September 7). Humana to reach consumers through video games. [Online]. Available: http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/stories/2007/09/03/daily40.html

Joystick Soldiers Call for Papers

The authors of a new chapter book on military video games have sent out a call for scholarly papers. “Joystick Soldiers: The military/war video game reader” is accepting 500 word abstracts by September 17. Here is part of the call, as seen over on Gameology:

The editors seek essays on military/war-themed video games which explore the multifaceted cultural, social, and economic linkages between video games and the military. The collection will feature scholarly work from a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including: close textual readings of military-themed video games; critical histories of game production processes and marketing practices; and reception studies of video war gamers, fandom, and politically resistant game interventions. As there is no other collection of its kind, Joystick Soldiers will make a significant contribution to the breadth of work shaping the burgeoning field of game studies, complementing analyses concerning the Military-Entertainment Complex, and offering diverse insights on how modern warfare has been represented and remediated in contemporary video games. The editors invite junior as well as established scholars to submit, and welcome cross-disciplinary work from sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, history, military studies, psychology, economics, media studies, visual communication, graphic arts and game design, education, and so forth.

Programming with Alice at Carnegie Mellon

In continuing our ongoing discussion of teaching kids programming skills by having them design their own computer games, Kathy Larason suggested I take a look at Alice over at Carnegie Mellon.

Alice is an introductory 3-D programming language that focuses on animation objects. The graphics are interactive, and could be constructed as games or animations. The main code and accompanying documentation are housed at alice.org.

Alice is a major endeavor. Four textbooks on programming with Alice were published in 2006; one in 2007; and at least one more is slated for 2008. Workshops are ongoing this summer, including sites at Carnegie Mellon, Roger Williams University, and Georgia Tech.

Alice has been widely adopted in schools and colleges. In a PowerPoint presentation led by Dennis Cosgrove, Caitlin Kelleher and others at ACM SIGCSE 2007 earlier this year, several statistics were given. The main site has had some 3.5 million page views, and almost half a million downloads of the program have occurred over the past year. About 250 colleges and universities are using Alice to teach programming.

Alice has a serious agenda. Computer Science majors continue to decline in numbers, and there are numerous ongoing efforts to interest girls and women in programming as well as math and the hard sciences. Researchers being as they are, several studies of Alice and its effect on this serious agenda are ongoing. One study of initial Computer Science class takers at Ithaca College and St. Joseph University showed a jump in grade averages (from C to B) and a large jump in willingness to take the second semester of Computer Science when participants were exposed to Alice prior to taking the class (see reference below).

Alice 3.0 is due out in 2008. Besides funding from the NSF, sponsors have included video game giant Electronic Arts, DARPA, Intel, Microsoft, the Office of Naval Research, and others. The Electronic Arts Foundation recently donated $300,000 to the effort, and EA has granted permission to use characters from The Sims 2 in Alice 3.0. The Sims line has long been the most popular computer video game series, and is appealing to both male and female players.

Alice is well worth watching as an introduction to computer programming. I’ll be interested in reading more about it as research studies continue to be published.

References

Moskal, M., Lurie, D., & Cooper, S. Evaluating the effectiveness of a new instructional approach. In Proceedings of 2004 SIGCSE Conference. Norfolk, VA.