Game Industry Finds Serious Outlet for Creative Energies

In fact, the game is designed to run on the older computers that typically populate places like a Midwestern county police headquarters, because there lies the game's target audience: Emergency "first responders" who may never get the chance to participate in real-world disaster exercises because of their prohibitive expense. The developers consulted with emergency response experts from around the country, according to producer Lucien Parsons.

Other companies offer virtual environments that let players start a small business, run a university, perform surgery, interact with a foreign culture, manage an office staff, or feed a famine-stricken nation.

Some serious games have no pedagogical or persuasive purpose. Breakaway turned a partially completed scuba-diving simulation into "FreeDive," an immersive underwater environment that serves as a distraction exercise for children undergoing painful medical procedures. The player wears a virtual-reality visor and uses a joystick to move through a soothing reef setting complete with sea turtles, undulating seaweed fronds and schools of fish.

Early testing, in which a group of 60 children placed their hands in ice water while playing a videogame based on the movie "Finding Nemo" -- which puts users in a similar environment to "FreeDive" -- showed an increase in average pain tolerance from 28 seconds of immersion to 78 seconds, according to the Catonsville, Md.-based Believe in Tomorrow National Children's Foundation, whose request initiated the FreeDive project.

Virtual Worlds, Real Money

In many cases, serious games are made available to users free of charge -- as with the U.N. World Food Program's FoodForce game (http://www.food-force.com/) -- or are distributed to trainees within the client organization, which means there is usually no sales revenue stream for the developer.

"The [business] model on the entertainment side is very much like a book deal, even a movie deal, where you're paid to develop something, but you are then paid a royalty [on sales] on top of that ... so there's a nice upside potential down the road," Tillett said. "The other side is all about a straight deal. You simply negotiate for time and materials ... and there isn't really any upside potential."

Nevertheless, serious-game developers see a lot of room for growth in their marketplace. Breakaway will make more then $10 million in revenue this year from its serious side -- about 75 percent of the company's business -- compared with $5 million last year, according to founder and chief executive Doug Whatley.

"It's pretty much been consistently doubling for the past four years for us," added Whatley, who said his company has about 110 employees and has been profitable for several years.

He believes that as more and more decisionmakers -- especially in the business sector -- see game-based training programs as an acceptable risk compared to traditional methods, the "floodgates will open."

"I do think we're ... just a couple of years away from a multibillion-dollar market," Whatley said.

If the serious-games sector continues to explode, it will be driven by one overriding factor: efficiency. The military -- which has used simulations in countless aspects for decades -- can now take advantage of recent advances in commercial computing power to put realistic training on the troops' desktops.

It's no longer necessary to deploy bulky simulator chambers or multimillion-dollar pieces of equipment to achieve virtually the same results, said Army Col. Casey Wardynski, who oversees the "America's Army" game program from his office at West Point.