Serious Games

While serious games should still be entertaining and engaging, they are also designed for another purpose. The main purpose of a serious game might be to train or education the player about some topic or they might enable the player to investigate an area or the game might be advertising a product or cause. Serious games have been developed in a number of arenas, including defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, politics, and religion.

Exploring Game Design for Cyber Security Training

SAIC sponsored a semester long project to explore using games for cyber security training. Cyber security includes a vast range of tools and technologies and new attacks are launched everyday. Training subjects are also wide ranging, from causal computer users to software engineers to system administrators to managers. Computer games could provide a medium for delivering training in an engaging format at levels appropriate for the individual trainees. Games can also be designed to keep pace with the trainee/player's skill level, offering them a constant challenge that will both reforce and advance their skills.

Publications

J. Mooney and J.M. Allbeck. Rethinking NPC Intelligence--A New Reputation System. ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games, 2014, pages 55-60.
Li, W., Balint, T. and Allbeck, J.M. Using a Parameterized Memory Model to Modulate NPC AI. In Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2013, pages 1-14.
  Nagarajan, A., Allbeck, J.M., Sood, A., and Janssen, T.L. Exploring Game Design for Cybersecurity Training. In Proceedings of IEEE Cyber 2012, pages 256-262.
Allbeck, J.M. CAROSA: A Tool for Authoring NPCs. In Proceedings of Motion in Games, Springer, 2010, pages 182-193.