CHAPTER 23
Stories in State-of-the-Art Serious Games

Nick Iuppa & Terry Borst

Because serious games are developed for a private clientele, rather than the commercial arena, any survey of how story narratives are being used in this field will necessarily be spotty. The Paramount/ICT/Army simulations highlighted in this book, are all, of course, serious games, and are worthy examples of how story is used in this area.

Several military simulations, America’s Army, Full Spectrum Warrior, Real War, and Close Combat, have been converted from in-house training games to successful commercial games. Close Combat, for example, hops from engagement to engagement within its series: the Battle of the Bulge; Utah Beach; Beirut, Lebanon during the Marine occupation. All these games are tactical exercises, emphasizing squad-based combat and stealth maneuvers. Story narrative is fairly minimal, although characters do exist and missions do advance progress.

Many serious games hue pretty tightly to tactical simulations, eschewing story, such as:

• Incident Commander teaches incident management for terrorist attacks, Columbine-like school shootings, and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
• Pulse teaches lifesaving techniques to emergency medical personnel.
• Interactive Trauma Trainer is a decision-based surgical training tool.

While story narrative remains fairly minimal in these projects, another Serious Game, World Hunger: Food Force, takes a more ambitious approach. A game about world hunger from the United Nations World Food Programme, the story revolves around a political crisis in the Indian Ocean, which triggers food shortages for millions of people. The WFP sends in a new team to step up the program’s presence, and via management of planes, ships, and trucks, the user races the clock to get food supplies delivered on time.

© 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-240-81343-1.00001-7

Other serious games using real stories include:

• Insider, developed for PricewaterhouseCoopers, teaches new auditors to understand derivatives on corporate balance sheets. Set in the future, users join the finance team of intergalactic mining company Gyronortex, where they are required to master the basics of hedging, swaps and options.
• Objection!, a game using animated 2D characters, teaches young lawyers in courtroom tactics with a series of civil and criminal trial scenarios.
• Darwin: Survival of the Fittest, another animated 2D character game, teaches stock options trading to new hires at a stock trading firm. A scenario involving a new trader trying to move up in the organization unfolds.
• Catechumen is a Half-Life mod where the user assumes the role of a persecuted Christian in ancient Rome. The Christian warrior-in-training is armed by an angel, with both physical and spiritual weapons, and must battle gladiators, lions, and centurions, in order to survive and help the nascent movement to prosper.

As serious games begin to take full advantage of state-of-the-art game technology (moving from 2D to 3D environments, from turn-based to real-time interactivity), story-driven simulations seem to become more necessary. This probably has much to do with the greater immersion that state-of-the-art media offers. When the pedagogical simulation is only slightly removed from old pen-and-paper training, we don’t expect much story narrative. When the simulation looks like a movie or contemporary videogame, we do.

SUMMARY

Serious games have begun to use more story elements to advance the training objectives of the simulation. As serious games become even more immersive, user demands for story are likely to increase, just as they have for entertainment videogames.