Game Industry Finds Serious Outlet for Creative Energies

"You can dump two zeroes off the end of the [training] cost equation," Wardynski said.

While "America's Army" -- an online first-person-perspective game with 6 million registered users -- is primarily a recruiting tool, one of Wardynski's other projects shows the potential of game-based training.

The Future Soldiers System uses a virtual environment to give new recruits a taste of basic training and experienced soldiers a look at new equipment. The goal is to familiarize the trainees with what they'll see, giving them a head start and "crunching down the learning cycle," Wardynski said.

Learning Through Play

The big challenge for an upstart industry is, of course, demonstrating that it's offering something better than the alternative. Within the blogs and other sites devoted to serious games, a bit of hand-wringing over the lack of concrete evidence can be detected.

"We are just now getting a body of knowledge big enough to try and understand whether it does make a difference," Tillett said.

"There are entire schools and colleges of education. There are thousands of scholars that study education. And they still have not quite figured out a mechanical recipe for education," Thomas said. "Add games into the mix and the questions don't get simpler."

"I worked in corporate training through the heyday of 'e-learning,'" Thomas said. "What I learned from that is that you can spend a lot of money on technology, and people still learn from the guy sitting in the cube next to them."

Geoffrey Rockwell, a multimedia professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, was a high school professor in the 1980s, and thought a text-based adventure game -- "you know, those games where you type, 'Go North,' 'Go South'"-- might intensify the learning experience for his English-as-a-second-language students.

"The first two days, they were saying, 'Oh my God, Mr. Rockwell is letting us play games,'" Rockwell recalled. "About the third or fourth day, I saw the penny drop when they realized they were supposed to be learning something. ... At a certain point the fun went out."

Still, both Thomas and Rockwell acknowledged that when applied to adult learning, which is the main focus of serious games, "fun" -- or the lack thereof -- might be less of a monkey wrench in the learning process.

"Typically what you get there is not games but simulations," Rockwell said. "They give you an opportunity to scale [out] ... complex situations ... where you can't really give [trainees] recipes for success, where everything is dependent on other things. ... They learn by playing it out under different rules, learn all the variables ... get them to understand nuances, like when there's a chemical fire, you hose it down and it actually makes things worse."

Facing the Consequences

Perhaps the biggest advantage of games over other training methods may be the flexibility they offer. Simulations can model consequences, showing players the results of their decisions, which serious-game proponents say is better than giving lectures on proper conduct.