GS: In the next five years, how do you think your use of serious games might evolve?

JB: At the Army Research Institute, our focus is trying to identify ways that training games can be improved and be more-effective training tools. We are working on how natural language understanding and knowledge representation systems can be incorporated into training systems. We are also interested in how instructional feedback can be integrated smoothly into the flow of the game, so the instruction does not interfere with the immersive experience.

I think the understanding of training games is still fairly immature. There are more than a few developers that build fun and immersive games, and they expect that learning will just take place. They have built entertaining games for years, and they can do that well, but just because a game has a military theme and is commercially entertaining doesn't mean it teaches useful military skills and capabilities. I would hope in the next five years there is more of a focus on making sure that the serious games are based on solid research so they actually teach what is intended.

PP: And in fact, at the instigation of some of our colleagues at the Naval War College, we have begun to explore how to articulate and employ a scientific basis for wargaming.

That is, we want to lay a foundation of principles that will allow for better development and use of games to achieve specific goals by starting with some basic guidelines and then innovating off of them, rather than relying on the raw talent of fledgling game designers and starting from scratch each time. I also expect that we will continue to expand our ideas and applications from military to nonmilitary fields