Media Dojo

To date, my idea of a “serious game” revolved around a pool table, money and a shot of straight liquor. PC-based or web-based games seemed more appropriate for the kids or geeks. It’s stereotypical, I know, but supported by years of anecdotal evidence.

However, I’m changing my view of games after a trip over to Breakaway Ltd. in Hunt Valley Maryland. At the end of May, the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism bussed us over there to hear about serious games. We learned that the Pentagon as well as healthcare institutions like Texas A&M took games very serious indeed. For a quick one pager on Breakaway, check out the Media Dojo Tear Sheet—Breakaway Ltd.

The problem is thus: how do you enable people to tinker with real concepts based on real situations—but without real consequences? Just as product engineers take great pains to stress their inventions to the breaking point before deploying them in the field, many of those who play for the highest stakes (war fighters and healthcare) are looking hard at game-based simulations to help them test-drive strategies or ideas before they go live.

I followed up with Breakaway CEO Doug Whatley this week to discuss how serious games might impact the cloud if, as we both agree, it’s a category that’s likely to diffuse beyond the defense and healthcare communities to other industry sectors.

Media Dojo: First, tell me how games chew up computing resources

Doug Whatley: Part of the reason that games are so cutting edge is that people often need to buy the latest and greatest machines to play the latest and greatest video games. So the best games always have a very high machine spec compared to the installed base. Since serious games are coming out of modeling and simulation, they fit naturally for the military because they were already training people in flight simulators or something similar. And for medicine, the fact that they have this very expensive, sophisticated dummy attached to a PC meant that medical customers were accustomed to buying a lot of equipment as well. The issue now for serious games is that if they’re to move beyond military or healthcare to become a regular part of training and education, the client hardware issue grows in importance. Often, you don’t find anything other than really old machines throughout government and the civil sectors. If you go into your local fire station, they’re likely to have a really old PC. So the ability for us to deliver them the latest training (or not) via a game simulation is more of an issue of them not having the equipment to run the software.

MD: Does Cloud Computing solve this problem?

DW: The appeal about cloud computing is that someone can sign on over the web and play the latest training game in the cloud without having to upgrade their local PC. That’s the perfect world. But in all areas of storage, processing and bandwidth, the resources in the cloud are being pulled pretty hard for games. The amount of data necessary for a lot of these simulations can be very large. Whether it’s the military or Homeland Security with their terrain databases, all of the DBs backing up that information are very large and all that data needs to be stored somewhere. If you have satellite images and other earth sensing data, it adds up pretty quick. To show people details of an actual city, that’s many GB of data. So the data storage and having a centralized location to keep that up to date is very useful. But because there’s so much data the throughput is very important as well. And the fact that you’re doing very sophisticated physics based simulations against those environments means that the processing is really getting hammered.

MD: What are the holes that need to be filled by cloud providers to drive adoption by game publishers like Breakaway?

DW: One of the biggest holes for adoption of cloud by games makers is the virtualization of certain kinds of hardware like 3D accelerators. It goes back to the processing needed in the cloud to where the web-based user experience mimics what you’d find if they had a latest version machine. There’s just not enough availability of virtualized hardware based in the cloud to really make game-based simulation a broad-based offering.

Another thing is that right now the cloud service providers are focused on the e-retailer market rather than the application vendor or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) market. Cloud providers need to step it up on the app vendor side as opposed to just expanding my sales capacity. Every cloud vendor has a riff talking about your web site getting mentioned on Good Morning America followed by a huge traffic spike. That variable burst capacity is great. But what if I’m an app service vendor and I’m pushing your cloud that hard all the time? It’s a different situation.

MD: Let’s imagine the cloud vendors are able to virtualize hardware better and provide an app-centric as opposed to website-centric service offer. How would that change your business of using game technology for simulations, modeling and training?

DW: What cloud-based delivery enables me to do is change my business to a subscription model. For example, if I create a fire training application, and allow firemen throughout the world to subscribe to my training service, that gives me such global reach that it completely changes my business economics. Right now, I’m out there trying to sell applications in a box and get people to buy them and go install them. With a cloud-based approach, I can switch to a more subscription based model. That’s actually what my customers want. That’s how the training budgets are paid for now. This goes back to the modeling and simulation versus training. It’s very common for companies or government employees to say, “I’m willing to pay $9.95 per person per month to have all my people trained in all these different areas”. That’s how they’re naturally inclined to purchase versus now where I have to convince them to buy in a different way.

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