I/ITSEC 2008
Age of Ecology, the “serious game” that Carl and I made last summer was made a finalist in the Serious Games Showcase & Challenge (SGS&C), meaning that we were invited to attend the 2008 I/ITSEC (Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference) in Orlando, Florida, where the SGS&C winner would be announced. So, for the last 4 days that is where I have been.
I/ITSEC is a conference about using technology to train and educate people. It is almost exclusively run by the military because the biggest use for technology in training is combat and flight simulators. The conference was ridiculously huge – the exhibit hall was so big you couldn’t see the end of it in 2 directions. And it was filled with all sorts of different companies showcasing their combat/flight simulators, 3D engines, and other related technologies. (There was even a human-sized hamster ball that I got to go in – it’s purpose is for 3D gaming in which the player wears a wireless headset that shows them a virtual world, and they can physically walk around in it. Except they’re not actually going anywhere because they’re in a giant hamster ball that can rotate freely in place and update the game based on which way it spins.) Here is the huge exhibit hall:
Anyway, what I was doing there was managing a booth where people who were walking by could stop and play Age of Ecology and/or have me walk them through how it works. Nearby were similar booths for all the other finalists. There were 3 divisions of finalists: student, small business, and government. There were 2 other finalists in the student division: a game about frogs by college students from Missouri and an interactive chemistry game (called Compound Reaction) by college students from North Carolina. So Age of Ecology was the only high school game, which attracted a fair amount of attention.
There were 2 awards we were trying to win. The first was the “Best Serious Game” award in the student category, which had already been decided by a panel of judges (who were all apparently really important people in their various fields of industry/research/whatever) although we didn’t know the results yet. The second was the “People’s Choice Award”, which was determined by popular vote. And after the award ceremony, our booth looked something like this…
Notice that blue ribbon thing? That means we won! :)
We won “Best Serious Game” in the student division, the one decided by all the important people. I got called up on stage to get a plaque and to shake hands with a whole bunch of people I didn’t know and to get my picture taken about a thousand times. Later there was an award ceremony in which I kept getting introduced to all these really important and highly-ranked military people. And people kept giving me their business cards and saying they might want to hire us. And I felt pretty out of place because I was about 50 years younger than everyone else and I was pretty much the only person there who wasn’t a military officer or some CEO of a company or something. And that’s pretty much it.
So, if you haven’t played Age of Ecology yet, maybe you would like to click here to experience our award-winning game! :)