Presentation by Rob Moore, Steve Seabolt (EA) at the Serious Games Summit, Game Developers Conference 2008.

Moore got stuck in bad weather but sent along some materials about A number of EA Sports titles are used by athletes, including by NASCAR drivers to get used to tracks, by pro basketball and football players to memorize. These were just unexpected uses of the ordinary commercial versions of games.

More recently, sports training professionals have become interested in using versions of these games for their purposes. One such company went to EA with this idea. The result is Madden Play Action Simulator, which XOS created via license from EA. The trainers have also used motion sensors and VR systems to play these games in correspondence with the simulator.

Seabolt talked about three projects from the past year in the Sims division. The first was EA's partnership with BP alternative energy in Sim City Societies. This division of BP makes solar panels and alternate energy power plants. They ame to EA and asked them to build a game about energy choices and consequences, offering to pay for it.

EA gave the canned response: we're not in the custom or educational games business. However, at the time they were deep in development on the fifth iteration of SimCity (which became SimCity Societies). Since pollution has always been a part of that game, Seabolt talked to the developers about a possible ways to make carbon a part of the game and take pollution out.

What they ended up doing is put in low carbon power. It's more expensive up front to put it in, and the game supports that short-term decision. The economic and envronmental impact of those choices are modeled in the game, so that wind instead of coal power affects the health of the society. BP paid EA to do this as a part of a "co-development" deal, but EA felt that it made sense for the game and made it more contemporary.

In Seabolt's opinion, players walk away from the game more informed. Working with BP, they strove to make the models scientifically accurate. Consumers worried this would be a huge sellout or "greenwashing," but many (perhaps most) players ended up feeling very good about this feature in the game. Morever, educators have chosen to adopt the game as a part of their classes.

Next, OLPC. The whole idea of EA participating in an open-source projet might seem counter-intuitive. The original SimCity was chosen, and after some effort made open-source around 6 months ago. Don Hopkins ported the open-source version of SimCity to OLPC (and also to Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), and players can also make alterations to the game either through its underlying source code (maybe unlikely) or through some tools Hopkins has started to develop.

Third, Alice. Attendance in computer science is down, and its particularly down in girls. In 5-8 grades, Carnegie Mellon University has an open source program called Alice, a drag-and-drop programming tool. At the time, Randy Pausch took a 6 month sabbatical at EA, and Seabolt asked if there was anything EA could provide as a part of his educational efforts. Pausch asked for all the characters and underlying animations for The Sims to be used in Alice. Alice 3.0 is about to be released, along with a new textbook. The Sims does get branding in the course, but there is no direct exchange of money. These characters and animations help engage girls, which EA and the Alice team hopes will encoruage more active use of Alice and thereby more interest in programming, math, and science.

All of the above is really old news, but Seabolt added some new thoughts. The Sims, he said, is unqiuely poiused to do well by doing good. But EA doesn't always want to take advantage of these opportunities. To guide their decisions, they ask the following questions:

- is the opportunity consistent with the brand
- will the player be delighted by the association
- is it an opportunity of scale

Because EA makes so much money from The Sims they don't have to flog the user with advertising. However, if the player feels that the content will be useful and beneficial. An example of Ford Mustang was offered: Ford paid EA to add them to the game, but players felt that it was a gift: "finally cool cars to drive in The Sims."

Comments (0) | Post a Comment