Half-Life 2 Taken Seriously

Gamasutra's coverage of the Serious Games Summit has more to offer. First Person First-Responder Gaming, Inside the Institute fro Creative Technologies, and Riding the Edge of Distributed Intelligence are all quite interesting. Half-Life 2 is seeing use in serious gaming, too, though, and they have it covered in Healthcare and Forestry in Half-Life 2. From the article: "After his overview, Holt went on to talk about the serious game mod projects he'd been working on, starting with a medical simulation game project, Pulse!!!, which is funded by Congress via the Office of Naval Research. The project is an early stage prototype in advance of a larger development system, to test the issues needed to successfully move nurse training into a full scale 3D game-like environment. For the doctors in the similation, he used an ordinary civilian model from Half-Life 2, but worked to give it better posture - the civilians in Half-Life 2 were pretty downtrodden and had a definite slouch. Otherwise, with a bit of cleaning up of the skin and textures, the engine was extremely functional for its task, including careful use of the AI scripting and other behavioral code."

fro Creative Technologies?

[AdamWeeden]

What's this have to do with my haircut?

The doctor in the game

[wowbagger]

Yes, but did they get Robert Picardo to record the voice for the doctor?

"Please state the nature of the emergency...."

WHAT?

[alta]

This is another one of those stories that leaves me thinking... WTF DID I JUST READ?

In what language does that combination of words mean something?

Granted, I was in a bad mood after reading the bad grammar in the game review that was just posted.

Re:WHAT?

[alta]

sorry, that was just rude. nevermind.

Re:WHAT?

[Phukko]

Don't apologize. This was a lousy article, about what could have been an interesting story. Just because one is writing about academia doen't mean it's necessary to sound like a tw*t.

Now simile for the camera...

[HTH NE1]

For the doctors in the similation...

they had to learn to ask questions of patients in such ways as, "How like a summer wind is the pain in your bowels?"

Death of Doom3

[phorm]

This sounds like a real kick in the pants to the doom3 engine. Previously, there was a good industry in selling the rights to use/modify the game engines from doom/quake in commercial products. Apparently effects is beaten out by physics in this case though, as the HL2 engine seems to be the one now selling for derivative products.

I wonder if HL2's engine will have as many derived projects as doom/quake did.

Re:Death of Doom3

[JFitzsimmons]

There are derrivatives of the doom3 engine. I think it is too early to tell if Doom3 or HL2 has/will have more games based on it, but I can say for sure, Doom3 is not a dead engine.

Re:Death of Doom3

[BrainInAJar]

i dunno, i didn't find quake4 too overly dark... dark, yes, but not too bad

America's Army

[TheZorch]

This sounds really similar to what happened when America's Army first came out. It was built around the Unreal Engine. Today it uses the latest version of that engine build.

Serious Games?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I see is a bunch of academics who can't actually make anything trying to invent a "field of study" for themselves, so they can get grants, pretend to be doing something important by sucking other academics' virtual dicks, and being generally useless.

The 9 coments on this story and a comparable number of comments in every "serious games" story tends to validate my point : nobody cares.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against academics and in fact I'm in academia, but I actually do useful re