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OCR for page 261
7
Games
T
his chapter deals with massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs)
as a tool for social and organizational modeling. An MMOG is
a type of computer game that enables hundreds or thousands of
players to simultaneously interact in a game world to which they are con-
nected via the Internet. Typically this kind of game is played in an online,
multiplayer-only persistent world (Wikipedia, 2007).1 These games are a
different kind of animal from the models and modeling approaches previ-
ously discussed.2 MMOGs are simultaneously tools that allow players to
interact with behavioral models, frameworks for building such models, and
laboratories in which these models can be tested.
WHAT ARE MASSIvELy MuLTIPLAyER ONLINE gAMES?
Games, particularly videogames, are a recent addition to the modeling
and simulation (M&S) tool suite. A videogame is defined as a mental contest,
1 Inthis chapter, the committee makes references to online communities and game manufac-
turers. Because of the nature of the games world, scholarly references are not often available,
nor are they the most up-to-date or accurate sources of information.
2 They are also not to be confused with “game theory,” a mature research area with strong
mathematical foundations established by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944), but, as
noted in Chapter 5, having significant constraints for application to real-world problems, the
most notable for this context being the massiveness of the multiplayer community-inhabiting
MMOGs; few game theory studies consider more than a handful of independent players or
“agents” (Moss, 2001). There are a number of other limitations to the game theory approach,
discussed extensively in Chapter 5.
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BEHAVIORAL MODELING AND SIMULATION
according to certain rules, played with a computer, for entertainment. In the
Department of Defense (DoD), the term used is “serious game,” which we
define in this report as a mental contest, according to certain rules, played
with a computer, that uses entertainment to further government or corporate
training, education, health, public policy, and strategic communication objec-
tives. An early examination of the potential for using games for modeling,
simulation, and analysis originates in the report Modeling and Simulation:
Linking Entertainment and Defense (National Research Council, 1997).
Games are an interaction medium, a set of engaging and immersive
models, and an interactive laboratory with which models and simulations
can engage. As an interaction medium, games provide a way for humans to
provide input and receive feedback in real time, participating in a running
simulation. If the game is immersive enough, this running simulation will
fully engage the attention of the game player, and that player will focus
on game play to the neglect of the external world. The most commercially
successful interactive games cyclically increase the adrenaline levels of the
player, while demanding little in the way of mental focus. Games that
demand great mental focus do poorly in the market and typically lose
player interest. M&S systems that are embedded in such an interaction
paradigm need to take this into account if the expectation is to make the
M&S system as engaging as a commercial game. The desired outcome for
this paradigm is that the M&S system will be so engaging that soldiers will
continue to work with the simulation during personal time. Many train-
ing simulations derived from the game America’s Army (described in more
detail below) and similar games belong to this category (Zyda, Mayberry,
McCree, and Davis, 2005).
Games also contain a set of engaging and immersive models, models
that look very interesting from the perspective of DoD. For example, a
large number of meetings start out with the phrase “if only we could build
an engaging game like SimCity”—that is, SimNavy for the Navy, SimAir
for the Air Force, etc. (Zyda et al., 1998). There are many problems with
such statements. The purpose for which the personal computer (PC) game
SimCity 3 and The Sims,4 its direct descendent, was written to entertain
3 SimCity is a PC game in which the user controls several elements of managing a city, such
as allocation of funding, distribution of community resources (police and fire stations, schools,
etc.), and community layout. Maxis (now Electronic Arts Inc.) released the first version of
SimCity in 1989. SimCity was the first game in the Sims franchise, and was the inspiration
for other nonviolent open-ended games, such as Sid Meier’s Civilization (Electronic Arts Inc.,
2006b). SimCity is partly based on Jay Forrester’s urban planning model, which is described
in Chapter 4 (Electronic Arts Inc., 2007).
4 The Sims is a PC game in which the user controls individual characters (Sims) in a “virtual
dollhouse.” The user is responsible for managing day-to-day needs of the Sims, such as their
need for fun, hygiene, food, rest, and social activity.
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GAMES
and engage the game player. No real attempt was made in that game or its
successors to accurately model the real world, nor was there any attempt
to verify, validate, or accredit (VV&A) the results of that game—it is pure
entertainment. It does, however, suggest a way in which one can develop
potential outcomes or possibility spaces that can then be considered for
further analysis. Probably the most interesting aspect of games like SimCity
(http://simcity3000unlimited.ea.com/us/guide/), The Sims (http://thesims.
ea.com/), and Civilization IV (http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/home.htm) is
that these games were built for relatively small amounts of money and on
schedule, and they still perform as extremely successful entertainment. DoD
M&S programs with budgets two orders of magnitude larger have failed to
deliver even a tenth of the capability to create a space of potential outcomes
for consideration (Bennington, 1995).
Games are also an interactive laboratory with which models and simu-
lations can engage. They can play the role in social and organizational
modeling that linear accelerators play in particle physics—testbeds built and
used to perform experiments and analyze results (Carley, Moon, Schneider,
and Shigiltchoff, 2005). Like linear accelerators, MMOGs are expensive
to build. The costs of successful immersive game development run from
$8 million for the first two years of game development for a Spartan effort
like America’s Army to more than $100 million to develop an MMOG and
its infrastructure.
To use a game as an interactive laboratory, it must be built or acquired
before experiments can be performed with it. If the intention is to connect
a social model to an MMOG for validation or improvement of the social
model, money is needed either to build the MMOG or to acquire the use of
it and the tools and permissions that allow its modification from a willing
game development partner. Note, however, that the entire FY 2008 esti-
mated budget of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, $3.085
billion (see http://www.darpa.mil/body/budg.html [accessed July 2007]),
is comparable to the current cash assets of a gaming giant like Electronic
Arts (see http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=ERTSandannual [accessed July
2007]), plus the expected revenue of $1 to $1.5 billion from an operating
MMOG.5 The size of the financial stakes for MMOG game companies
means that getting the attention of a game development partner may rely
more on personal connections or a fully funded joint basic research agenda
than on any financial incentives that DoD could offer.
5 Considerthe single MMOG World of Warcraft with an estimated 8 million+ players paying
$12.99 a month, for annual revenues of approximately $1.2 billion.
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4 BEHAVIORAL MODELING AND SIMULATION
STATE OF THE ART
Our review of the state of the art in MMOGs considers the three roles
of games separately—games as an interaction medium, games as a set of
models, and games as interactive laboratories.
games as an Interaction Medium
Games as an interactive medium are always changing and improving.
The drivers for innovation in the game industry are new technology for
making the games ever more immersive and interactive, as well as industry
competition and emulation. The driver for many years has been the increas-
ing graphics speeds for PCs and consoles. That drive has made photorealism
one of the major pushes for interactive games. Soundscape complexity has
also made games more immersive as PCs and consoles have improved their
sound support capabilities. The first Dolby 5.1 certified game, America’s
Army, was developed in 2002, and now this feature is included in almost
all games.
We are near the point of diminishing return for graphics improve-
ments, and people are now focusing on “fully interactive worlds.” The
best example of the fully interactive world style is Rockstar’s Grand Theft
Auto: San Andreas (GTA-SA). While the story line may lack redeeming
social value, the game is so popular because the game player can interact
with everything in the game’s world in a nonlinear fashion. This means that
the player can navigate the world and do whatever comes to mind, without
being constrained to a single story path, as in many games. The fact that
there are missions to complete in GTA-SA is perhaps unimportant. It is
the journey and the accompanying interaction that immerse and retain the
player. If one wanted to have one game as representative of state of the art,
then GTA-SA is that game with its fully interactive world paradigm, but
the number of games attempting to copy that paradigm is quite large; the
most notable is the Godfather game of Electronic Arts.
games as a Set of Engaging and Immersive Models
The games Sims 2, by Electronic Arts Inc., and Civilization IV, by
Firaxis, represent the state of the art with respect to games as a set of
engaging and immersive models. Sims 2 is a game that allows the player
to create virtual characters, or Sims, and then direct them over a virtual
lifetime. Settable parameters include gene mix across generations, life goals,
popularity, fortune, family, romance, knowledge, financial status, and life-
style. Sims can be pushed to extremes “from getting busted to seeing a
ghost, from marrying an alien to writing a great novel” (Electronic Arts
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Inc., 2006a). The game allows the player to fulfill dreams, to try extremes,
and to basically explore potential outcomes and possibility spaces.
Civilization IV is a game that allows the player to create a civilization
from its inception to its pinnacle and eventual demise. Players can choose
peace and growth or choose a war footing, all from an easy-to-use interface.
Civilization IV comes with a stream of easy-to-use modification tools that
allow players to create and integrate their own interests into the game. As
in Sims 2, Civilization IV allows the player to explore possibility spaces
and potential outcomes. It is that capability that makes the modeling and
simulation of these games very interesting to DoD and to the Department
of Homeland Security. The question is often asked, “How do we connect
these games, with near-zero modification, to real news feeds so that we can
compare their ‘predictions’ against what subsequently happens in the real
world?” Of course, these games are written to explore potential outcomes
and not to be predictive, but there is a continual quest to achieve predic-
tions, as in the film “Minority Report.”
games as an Interactive Laboratory
MMOGs as interactive laboratories provide a state-of-the-art capability
with respect to DoD goals. The idea is, for example, that if it were pos-
sible to test models of what causes insurgencies against large groups of real
online people, one could then understand and run the models backward to
change the conditions so that the insurgencies do not happen. This is a tall
order, built on several premises. The first premise is that models exist of
the cause of insurgencies, and there is no way to test those models in real
life. An additional premise is that if one could test and prove those models
against real people in MMOGS, one would then have greater confidence
in deploying the ideas embodied in the models in real life. The interesting
point of such discussions is the desire to test social models using existing
MMOGs rather than having DoD create its own testbed, thereby saving
$100 million of testbed development costs that could be used to create
models.
To consider the top 10 MMOGs, how relevant or close to the problem
are they? World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Final Fantasy
XI, Eve Online, Guild Wars, RuneScape, Everquest 2, Maple Story, Dark
Age of Camelot, and Lineage 2 were the top 10 MMOGs listed by one site as
of July 2007 (see http://www.the-top-tens.com/lists/top-ten-mmorpg-games.
asp [accessed July 2007]). Although their visuals are far from realistic,
and their stories are mostly about worlds that don’t exist and quests not
linked to real life, the stories are all about the fights between good and
evil, not unlike today’s global war on terrorism. So the thought is to take
one or more of these MMOGs, modify the story a bit, put in links to the
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predictive models to be tested, and then see if one can begin the process of
predicting player behavior in the MMOG with connected systems. If that
can be done, then perhaps it will be possible to run the models backward
to stop insurgencies before they form or interdict them earlier before they
gain strength.
RELEvANCE, LIMITATIONS, AND FuTuRE DIRECTIONS
This section explores how MMOGs can be used to address DoD prob-
lems, the limitations on that use, and the next steps needed to address those
limitations. The discussion is organized around the three major capabili-
ties offered by MMOGs: an interaction medium, a set of models, and an
interactive laboratory.
games as an Interaction Medium
Interactive games are great interfaces to models and simulations,
because designers have created an interface typically more intuitive than
that in comparable DoD-developed M&S systems. Interactive games typi-
cally require no reading of manuals and have the player up and running in
three minutes or less. The corresponding time is typically months for com-
parable DoD M&S systems. So if the goal is to put models and simulations
into the largest number of hands possible, then an interactive game interface
is the right way to go. An additional advantage of interactive games is that
their development and modification tools are easier to use than the simula-
tion setup tools used by DoD. If defense simulations were as easy to set
up as games, modelers’ ability to explore possibility spaces and potential
outcomes would be dramatically increased.
Games as an interaction medium are limited, at the moment, to games
designed and implemented by the game development industry for entertain-
ment purposes. For DoD use, those games must either be used as they are
or modified with available tools. An additional limiting factor is that DoD
does not typically have access to personnel skilled in game development.
Interactive games, their supporting hardware infrastructures, their sup-
porting software, and their input devices are under constant pressure to
innovate and evolve. The biggest change coming in the next few years will
be in the underlying models of human and organizational behavior, par-
ticularly with respect to the modeling, display, and input of human emotion
into the interactive game. Think of this as adding to the communication
modalities already employed in games: visual display, auditory display,
haptic display, and (coming soon) two-way emotional communication and
display. Low-cost sensors that read parts of the human emotional state have
already been designed for use as game input devices. These sensors provide
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virtual sensors indicating mental focus, adrenaline, surprise/response, and
relaxation, along with physiological measures of heart rate, blink rate,
breathing rate, and oxygen level in the blood. Software using these mea-
sures is already under development for use in evaluating games before they
are shipped to determine what does or does not work in the produced game.
Experiments are under way to determine how to use emotional inputs in
games, including how to display appropriate emotions back to the player
based on his/her personal state.
games as a Set of Engaging and Immersive Models
The set of models inside engaging and immersive commercial games
are proprietary and somewhat of a black box. We (DoD and its modeling
researchers) cannot look at those models or modify them, other than the
parameters exposed from the game’s interface or provided via modification
tools. We cannot VV&A those models—but we probably haven’t really
been able to achieve real VV&A with defense models and simulations,
either (see Validation, Chapter 8). What we do know is that games like
The Sims 2 and Civilization IV look quite capable for use in defense prob-
lems, if only we could modify them, even slightly, for defense purposes. It
would be interesting to know whether one could explore more of the space
of potential insurgency outcomes with Civilization IV, developed at a cost
of some $20 million, than with JSIMS, developed at a cost of $1.8 billion.
Could modelers do that exploration with just the available Civilization IV
modification tools?
Likewise it should be possible to run experiments in virtual worlds simi-
lar to Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com), perhaps with a somewhat
less benign set of rules, which would have military and strategic applica-
tions. For example, imagine Second Life with sovereign state entities, some
of which were motivated to expand and dominate other regions of the game
space. What would be the behavioral/organizational reactions of the other
players? It is likely that genuine social experiments could be undertaken in
settings like this, at a cost far below JSIMS. As another example, the popular
board game Diplomacy is already available for online play (see http://www.
diplom.org/index.py); it ought to be possible to modify it to bring it up to
date in terms of state actors and allow for multiplayer states with their own
internal decision-making processes, political parties, cultures, etc. Of course,
there would be issues that would need to be thought through, such as access
to the online games by hostiles, the potential for abuse of human subjects by
traumatizing their avatars, and how to make the costs and benefits “real”
(so that the players are not casual about starting virtual wars, for example).
However, it seems clear that the potential gains are large enough to warrant
some real effort devoted to overcoming these obstacles.
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Since the models inside games are typically proprietary and not pre-
cisely what DoD requires, this mismatch makes it hard for DoD to accept
and utilize such models. If DoD were to establish its own serious game
development studio, this limitation could be overcome.
Also, since games are typically designed for entertainment, they often
provide a misrepresentation of reality—for example, compressed time,
inaccurate social networks, and missing cultural factors. If games are to be
used for training, then greater attention needs to be paid to which aspects of
reality need to be more carefully characterized in the games. This requires
basic research on what factors are needed for what purpose, the inclusion
of facts about social and cultural behavior, and the inclusion of social and
organizational scientists as members of the game development team.
games as an Interactive Laboratory
MMOGs are proprietary and written for a particular entertainment
purpose, with rules very much unlike those found in real life. Players get
to be heroes, villains, and superheroes in MMOGs and are often able to
transport their virtual characters across large terrains without apparent cost
in time or physics. So while it looks as if modelers might be able to do some
experiments with MMOGs relevant to DoD concerns, there are definitely
issues in the details.
MMOGs as interactive laboratories are limited in their use for DoD
purposes because they were built for entertainment. For MMOGs to
become widely used in DoD, DoD may need to establish its own studio to
build such an MMOG, using a mix of game industry veterans and defense
M&S personnel. A vision for what this might look like is the collection
of art resources and animations from the America’s Army game ported
to a larger, more open platform (U.S. Army, 2007). Right now, America’s
Army is built on the Epicgames Unreal-2 game engine, an engine limited
to small squad-on-squad play (32 players total) and small areas of terrain
(1 km × 1 km). In addition, access to the art resources and code from
America’s Army has been restricted to DoD due to proprietary game engine
license issues and close control of those resources by the Army project
management team. Good small training systems have been built using
the America’s Army material (see http://info.americasarmy.com), but in
general, the close hold of the source code and game resources has made it
difficult for DoD scientists desiring to use that material to be able to build
the additions and extensions necessary to carry out their research. As DoD
moves to the larger realm of MMOGs for social model experimentation
and to a game engine capable of handling much larger terrains of concern,
the openness and accessibility challenge needs to be solved for the greater
DoD good.
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Funding a specialized MMOG game studio outside the government
would be one approach to the challenge, perhaps within the environment
afforded by a specialized cross-departmental university center, such as
the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University (see
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/) or as a university-affiliated research center but
with more internal development capability than seen at labs like the highly
successful Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern
California. There are many applications for which this MMOG will be of
value. A particular MMOG that would have great applicability is one that
implemented the various alternative futures as described in the report Map-
ping the Global Future (National Intelligence Council, 2004). Understand-
ing those potential outcomes and being able to roll back to a state in which
the potential outcome does not happen would be a great tool for designing
better national policies.
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