There has been quite a lot of coverage and discussion in the press of late about “serious games” – using computer game technology for serious purposes such as situation training and education. It’s really encouraging as it’s something I’ve been interested for a long time and started to get into a while back.

I picked up on this article in particular as it mentions a couple of projects I’m familar with.

First of all it mentions Tim Holt’s GNNViz project which I’ve been lucky enough to follow the development of. Tim has done some amazing work getting real world terrain and forestry data into existing game engines – no mean feat. Tim’s had to write a number of custom tools to transform the data types and custom shaders to give a realistic appearence to all those thousands of square kilometers of terrain.

Secondly, the article touches on the on-going development of “PULSE!!” which I mentioned in a previous post here. I hadn’t heard much of if after the initial demonstration so it’s nice to see it’s continuing to be developed.

With a lot of negativity towards games (e.g. “Bully”) and their social impact in the press it’s encouraging to see more articles like this one promoting the positive uses for the technology. That said, from my “insider” info the number of serious games in development or discussion is growing so maybe 2007 will be a boom year.

Start buying stock in Transmodrify now! ;o)

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