E3 '07: Serious Games maintains a straight face

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--Amidst the (admittedly rather subdued) craziness of E3, which included free vodka shots, Wii Fit, and people wandering around dressed as roosters, one organisation was sitting quietly in the corner trying to be serious.

Those people were the Serious Games Initiative, and it has been slowly getting more and more visible over the past few years, and is present at E3 to try to put out its messages that games can not only be fun, they can be useful too.

A variety of titles and companies were crammed into the Initiative's floor space at E3. One of those, Persuasive Games, had a variety of titles on show, including Presidential Pong, which caught GameSpot's attention back in June. The Atlanta-based company is not just a one-trick pony, however, and they had an array of other serious-message-but-fun-to-play titles on display.

The first, Points of Entry, is described as "an immigration challenge." The gamer takes on the role of an immigration officer and battles against another colleague to get the most immigrants into the country. A Persuasive Games spokesperson told GameSpot that the game was meant to make those playing it think about immigration issues, for instance: "If you're a supermodel, then it's really easy to get in, but it's really hard if you're a nurse. Which is crazy, because there's a huge shortage of nurses right now."

In The Arcade Wire: Airport Security, the game is set at an airport, where various items are banned. Gamers must search for these items on people queuing to get into the departure lounge, and in their bags that go through an x-ray machine. If a 'banned' item gets through, that's very bad news indeed! The spokesperson said, "You start off and it's just shoes that are banned, so you have to take everyone's shoes. Then various other items become banned. Very quickly it becomes silly and it makes you really think about what's going on with homeland security."

Another game, Food Import Folly, focused on trying to ensure that all food entering the US was safe to consume. Gamers play an FDA inspector, "of which there are only two in the country," and the game is basically an exercise in frustration as players realise what a vast and complicated task the job is.

Persuasive Games was founded by Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost, and describes itself as "an independent, experimental game studio." The company is currently in partnership with the New York Times to publish one game a month on the newspaper's Web site.

Another company touting its virtual wares was Breakaway Ltd, a game development company based in Maryland, and has created a range of serious game titles for military training for clients like the Department of Justice, as well as general games for the entertainment industry. On the company's screen was Pulse!!, which was billed as "a virtual learning lab for healthcare training." The demo showed a virtual hospital where "healthcare professionals can practice clinical skills"--without such pesky problems as patients dying while they're in training.

The company also develops a "pain management" game--the aim of which is to distract patients from pain while they are undergoing painful medical procedures and operations, for example chemotherapy. Free Dive is an undersea exploration adventure where children can search for virtual treasure, and Turbo Turtle--also aimed at kids--is a more challenging and fast-paced version of Free Dive where gamers navigate a Turbo Turtle vehicle through rings to score points.

Just a couple of metres away was Etcetera Entertainment, a company that specialises in virtual training solutions. Business development director Marta DePaul showed GameSpot Safe Dock Beta, a game that simulated a virtual loading bay. An unusual subject for a game perhaps, but DePaul thought it was an elegant solution for two reasons. The first is that there are over 100,000 injures related to forklift loading every year, and instead of training seminars and handouts, the company had found that, "We are already starting to see that people are learning faster and retaining information better."

The other raison d'etre of Safe Dock Beta is that, "We've been having trouble recruiting the 18 to 30s because they see it as a job that their parents did. The game is a way to reach them."