For day two, I decided to focus on the Serious Games Challenge, an event that Intelligent Decisions is helping to sponsor. Before I went over there (and, coincidentally, to meet one of my fellow GamersInfo.net writers), I walked the floor a bit.

Stottler Henke is a company out of California that was focusing on ideas such as Intelligent Tutoring and Automated AARs (After Action Reviews). Its Intelligent Tutoring helps users learn by giving them hints customized to the user to help them past frustrations.

SimBionic, a soon-to-be-open-source tool Stottler Henke developed, allows them to author human simulation. It allows nested behaviors and polymorphism. SimCore is a lightweight role-playing tool that is quickly customizable.

The company also has iPhone and Second Life applications.

Next, after a spot of lunch, I hit the Serious Game Challenge. This is the fifth year for the challenge, with 37 entrants this year, up from 30 last year. Twelve games are finalists plus two honorable mentions. I only managed to make it through half of them on day two, figuring I’d need to hit the other half on day three. I concentrated on the student and government entries.

Boarders Ahoy! by NATO ACT is a single-player or multiplayer, first-person game that simulates boarding a ship. The players are required to interview the crew, check their documentation and flag possible contraband or suspicious cargo. Cargo might be as simple as a box full of undeclared cargo or something as subtle as a room that is too small compared to the floor plans. It was written using the Ogre3D engine.

Moonbase Alpha is a free online game for up to six players at a time developed in conjunction with NASA. The players face a moonbase that has been damaged by a meteor storm in 2025; it is up to them to repair the oxygen systems within 25 minutes by utilizing a variety of tools, robots and a rover.

The Invasion Prevention CPI Trainer is from Defense Acquisitions University at Fort Belvoir. Any Department of Defense personnel spending DoD money are required to be certified by the DAU. Using a 1930s theme of alien invasion, the player is a worker at “Invasion Prevention Corporation” and answers questions saying which CPI tool they need to use to solve certain problems in building munitions that will stop the alien invasion. The interface is designed to be simple, benign, and tranquil, in order to work a wide variety of education levels and levels of patience amongst the users.

Inner Cell is a game developed to analyze how people learn from games. The oddly hypnotic game involves pathogens versus the immune system, but the real goal to the game is to see WHY people are learning.

TerraForm from NC State University takes place in an alternate 1973, when global warming is forcing the player’s company to take advantage of alternate worlds. The first-person aspect game takes the player through a variety of puzzles that are solved by coming up with the proper chemical combination of elements. It currently uses the Unreal engine, though they’re planning on moving it to Unity so it can be WWW-based.

Energize is a joint effort of the Orlando Science Center, Progress Energy and FIEA at the University of Central Florida. It is a SimCity-like game that has the player building power systems, balancing cost and environmental impact to keep their city powered. Various levels of power include everything from wind to biofuels, fossil fuels to nuclear power.

Unfortunately, my time at the Serious Games Challenge meant I missed an appointment over at Organic Motion. However, when I got over to their booth, their CEO Andrew Tschesnok was gracious enough to give me a few minutes of his time. This is Organic Motion’s third I/ITSEC — I knew them from last year, when their booth was right next door to ours.

Tschesnok feels things are getting very exciting in the realm of serious gaming. Kinect, Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 add-on that uses gesture-based motion to allow a player to control the game without the use of any kind of controller in his or her hand, is a step in the right direction, he feels. Graphics have exploded in terms of detail and technology, but we’re still using the same interfaces.

Organic Motion uses standard cameras through its software to recognize what the user is doing. That makes Organic Motion a software company, not a hardware company. A setup such as the one at I/ITSEC uses 14 cameras, though as its technology progresses, he expects that number to drop. Down the road, he envisions your game room becoming basically the holodeck from Star Trek — when you install your surround sound system, you simply put the cameras with the speakers, and from there, the entire room becomes the interface.

The goal is not to have a screen showing you the game, but to have the screen be a window between the player and the rest of the simulation or the game. That means that the other players, characters, avatars, what have you can see you, what you’re doing, and react appropriately. For instance, should the player be receiving a briefing from their CO, and instead of paying attention they are looking around, the CO will notice it and tell them to look at him.

Combined with 3-D technology, using parallax, this means an unprecedented level of interaction between player and the game, creating the fundamental change to the system that creates the window effect that Tschesnok predicts.