Games, Games, Games, we make them smart now, what will my grandkids play?

I am having a lot of game exposure in the next couple of months. A couple of weeks ago I met Aneesh Chopra the White House CTO at an event where he talked about STEM, simulation, and games in Washington. I went to an Innovation Transfer Network meeting on Serious Games at Shippensburg University yesterday. My daughter asked to play Temple Run while we waited for the bus this morning.  I am going to the Game Developers Conference in a couple of weeks and then Discovery Machine exhibits at GameTech 2012 in Orlando, March 28-30.

Where have we been and where will we go with computer games?   I am sure some geek built a cathode ray game in the 40s. Someone tried to build a game to play Chess in England in the 50s and could not get there.  My first game was Pong in 1973.  At Discovery Machine today, one side of our business builds behavior modeling AI for battlefield games like Bohemia Interactive’s VBS2 and VT MAK’s VR Forces.  We build AI for US DoD games. We build intelligent avatars and devices that have a complete life of their own.  You can talk to them and they talk back.  You can make them have a good mood or point your gun at them and their mood drops.

Just search Free Online Games. It is actually a slow search because there are 184 million results.

While games are fun and I cannot image the games my grand kids will play, some do waste our time. We all have spent 10 minutes trying to get all 9 stars on level IV in Angry Birds. That wasn’t a waste, I won! (note the mood thing)

Games are here to teach too.  Games can teach you a language or how to play an instrument. Doctors surgery techniques. Soldiers how to fight. I consider the best games are ones that teach and are intelligent .  I will be seeing a lot of the latest games in the next few weeks. I will tell you what I liked the best. If you are going to GDC or GameTech, drop me a note so we can chat or play a game   jmcassey(at)discoverymachine.com