Big Business Loves the Computer Gaming Industry

David Greenspan writes "Video games are no longer exclusive to a consumer market. Business Week has an article on the new trend of big business willing to pay millions for custom-made games. The casual market has inspired folks in business to realize the broad appeal of games, and some of the possibilities inherent to the medium. As a result, business games are now big business. From the article: 'To reach the billion-dollar mark, the market will have to overcome the common wisdom that games are inherently not serious. A serious games market will also require game developers to shift from the traditional business-to-consumer model to a business-to-business one. Today when major studios and publishers are approached by companies interested in commissioning, say, an employee-training game based on a successful commercial title, more often than not those studios and publishers decline. Even if the interested company is offering $5 million, it's not worth the gamemakers' time to divert engineers from a commercial title likely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.'"

Cereal Phlegm Monsters

[Stanistani]

My son was too young for Doom, but in his box of cereal one day was a Doom clone called ChexQuest [wikipedia.org], which we both loved. Strictly a corporate game, but a lot of fun, with phlegm instead of death and gore.

Learning tool indead

[GreggBz]

As a Unix administrator, I immediately see an application for this as a training tool.

You have Unix at home now, but no stress or incentive to scramble in learning it. My biggest hurdle and that of most anyone just starting out, is translating academic and hobby experience into the real world.

It would be neat if someone would write a Linux application that simulated all kinds of disasters/problems in a real captivating environment, spiced it up a little with some kind of interesting plot-line, and left the user to his own devices to try and solve these problems. You'd give him the tools already present on his home computer, namely, everything that is Linux. Even it it was only slightly compelling, it would still be a step up from reading man pages out of simple curiosity. It would also give you problems to solve that would not otherwise present themselves in the scope of a home environment.

Turn this all into a game, and score the "player" on his resourcefulness and the correctness of his solutions.

Sims for NASCAR drivers

[Mirele]

My sister's nephew (her brother-in-law's son) is a rookie driver in NASCAR. Every track has a computerized simulation and he drives the sim every week for practice, even if he's not scheduled to drive in the race. All the drivers do these sims. I have no idea how much these sims cost to produce, or how often they're revised.

Name change

[Ender77]

We need a new name that describes mature video games in more mature terms. the same way that graphic novels separated itself from comic books.

Re:Cereal Phlegm Monsters

[Sinkael]

Do you remember the McDonalds game on the Nintendo (I think) Not as fun as chex quest but, this concept isn't actually new.

Interactive [non] Fiction to the Rescue!

[martyb]

FTFS:

Today when major studios and publishers are approached by companies interested in commissioning, say, an employee-training game based on a successful commercial title, more often than not those studios and publishers decline. Even if the interested company is offering $5 million, it's not worth the gamemakers' time to divert engineers from a commercial title likely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.

Okay, I'll bite. What about a text-based interactive fiction game? I spent hours and hours while in college trying to solve adventure [slashdot.org]. (Aside: Solved it with 350 out of 350 points on May 9, 1977.) Why did I do THAT when I had so many other demands on my time?

• Had fun solving puzzles.
• Was in competition with classmates.
• Kept trying to beat my best score.
• Learned different ways to look at things.

So, an IF game with some "rooms" which had "puzzles" to solve would be simple enough to create. To make it playable and enjoyable, well, that's another matter, but even then it's quite doable. (<grin>Some of us nerds DO know how to write!</grin>)

Example: Customer Service Representative (CSR) for an in-house application. Take some cases from the Tier-1 call center "solution scripts". Wrap it up in a day's adventure with incoming calls and a count-up timer for how long it took you to solve particular puzzle(s). Have some notes on a hall-way white board. A "manual" that you find on a table in the corporate library. Get x-amount of points for solving each puzzle. As the game progresses, a user could be given access with a special pass to higher floors in the building where increasingly difficult challenges await. (Take these from Tier-2 call center solutions.) Create some "colorful" customers to highlight different response techniques. (Screaming Sammy, Timid Tom, Newbie Ned, Impulsive Ivan, etc.) You get the idea.

To sum this up, there's an old saw that I believe is apropos here:

Tell me, and I will forget.

Show me, and I may remember.

Involve me, and I will understand.

$5 million? Sure! I'd like a piece of that! Heck, for JUST $100K, I could *easily* create a "game" in a month or two. AND, it would be easy to extend to other levels and challenges. AND, because it was text-based, it could easily run as an application on a phone or PDA.

Any takers?

Re:The Real SimCity

[dkf]

Take SimCity for example - if you could adapt it to instead be used for city-planning in works departments (water, gas, civil/construction, hydro, etc.), it would make things more simple/easy, and it could simulate the future.

The main problem with SimCity is that' it's fundamentally grid-based, and cities by and large aren't (though some in North America come close). Adapting the code so that it can support real city layouts is non-trivial, since it forces you to stop using simplifying assumptions (e.g. can't use manhattan distance metrics).