GeoCommander - Best Government Game
High School, Military and Commercial Serious Games Developers Take Contest To New Levels with STEM, Medical and Military Applications
Following my previous posts Serious Games Showcase & Challenge 2008 and Serious Games Showcase & Challenge 2008 - Call For Entries, The Interservice/Industry Training Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) is proud to announce the winners of the 2008 competition.
The 2008 challenge saw a dramatic growth fueled by the industry sponsorship of Autodesk, Adobe, SAIC, Presagis, the Lockheed Martin Virtual Worlds Lab, DISTI, D&SCI, Mymic, ECS, VMASC, Hewlett Packard, and NTSA, and produced an entrant field that nearly tripled the previous years.
After a multi-step evaluation process, the top 12 entries in three categories were selected for showcasing at the annual I/ITSEC conference from Dec 1-4 2008 in Orlando, Florida.
The finalists displayed a wide variety of serious game applications for all skill levels and backgrounds including: vehicle maintenance, geo-location, preventive medicine, emergency response management, environmental management, creature identification in a natural habitat, chemical interactions, ancient civilizations, and urban warfare.
The finalists were eligible for five awards: Best Overall Serious Game, Best Small Business Serious Game, Best Government Serious Game and Best Student Serious Game, selected by a panel of nearly 50 distinguished serious game experts from academia, government, and industry.
In addition, there was one award -- The People's Choice Award – which was determined by votes cast by the 17,800 attendees of the I/ITSEC conference itself.
The winner of both the Overall Best Serious Game and Best Small Business Game was Burn Center, developed by 360Ed.
Burn Center is a fast-paced, medically-accurate simulation of a mass-casualty disaster involving multiple burn victims. Developed to electronically recreate established medical procedures and tactics, it follows patients over the course of 36 hours of treatment in an intensive care unit.
U.S. Navy SPAWAR Systems Command, Program Executive Office GeoCommander was built from the ground up as a Serious Game solution to address the problem of accurate Geo Location of hostile forces supporting the Global War on Terror.
The winner of Best Student Game was Age of Ecology developed by High School interns Alexander Wein of Palo Alto, California and Carl Jackson of Andover, Maryland while working as interns at the United States Geologic Survey. As part of their award package, Wein and Jackson each received a copy of Adobe® Director® 11 and Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2009.
Age of Ecology is inspired by the environmentally non-sustainable aspects of existing strategy games. Players buy and zone lands, invest in the productive capacities of land use, and mitigate natural hazards like floods and earthquakes. Through the addition of population, infrastructure and capitalistic development they generate pollution and revenues. The goal is to find the optimal balance between industrial capacity and the needs of the environment.
The winner of the People's Choice Award was Canadian Forces: Direct Action, developed by the Army Learning Support Center, Canadian Armed Forces.
Real-world Canadian weaponry and tactical aids such as flash-bang grenades and pepper spray are used to carry out missions in the simulated urban environments which have been created to accurately represent real-world locations using geo-location data.
Direct Action is a mod of the commercial game SWAT4.
LEVELS
A variety of custom levels has been created to address various training needs of CF and allied training establishments.
Bordertown Slums
Bus Station Level
Operation Daybreak
Desert Operations
Woodland Grow Op
Dodge City at CFB Gagetown
University Level