Want to See Your Video Game Reborn at the Pentagon? IBM Can Help

Critics thought that the time-traveling feature in Achron, a real-time strategy game, was an interesting twist. But the game received low review scores and quickly faded from memory. Normally, when a game fails, all the development time that went into its cool features and technological innovation either gets folded into a new project or goes to waste, but thanks to IBM, Achron piqued the interest of a new type of client: the Pentagon.

IBM's Serious Games Program Manager Phaedra Boinodiris, speaking yesterday at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, explained how a game for consumers ended up in the hands of the military.

A few years ago, Boinodiris gave a talk at a summit sponsored by United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), which manages logistics across all branches of the military. Afterward, she was approached by a four-star general interested in what a game that could improve logistics innovation for the military would look like.

In Achron, if you send your troops into a deathtrap, you can jump back in time, and use what you learned about the enemy positions to set up your own ambush.

A gameplay trailer for Achron.

The Resequence Engine, as Hazardous Software calls it, was then used to create a simulation informed by real world data to help the military prepare for and respond to any number of situations.

It could help the military simulate and optimize supply chains and response times, but could also help it deal with things like improvised explosive devices (IEDs). By jumping into any point in time in a simulation of a city patrolled by the military, making decisions, and seeing how those decisions ripple through the simulation, multiple users could work together to determine long term effects and optimize procedures.

Boinodiris and Hazard went on to present the concept to DARPA and Ashton Carter at the Pentagon, currently the United States Secretary of Defense.

"Basically what they said to us after the presentation was over was, 'you know, we've been using first-person shooters for so long to train our soldiers, this concept of process improvement, mission optimization, but also more importantly, the vetting of strategy and tactics, this is really cool,'" she said.

By telling the story of Achron's reincarnation as a military tool, Boinodiris was hoping to convince game makers at GDC to sell their products on the company's "digital innovation platform," IBM Bluemix. Together with IBM's SmartPlay Framework, it helps developers tweak and sell games or parts of their games to enterprise business, the military, health care industry, government, and other untapped clients.

Developer BreakAway Games, which worked on popular strategy game franchises like Command & Conquer and Civilization, saw similar interest from the health care industry. It created Code Yellow, which was meant to help hospitals prepare for disaster response. Hospitals liked the idea and asked to feed their own data into it—their number of beds, physicians, and floorplan—so it could simulate, test, and improve their readiness for an ebola outbreak or a terrorist attack.

"The premise here is that we know you've worked hard to create intellectual property," Boinodiris told the developers in the audience. "Whether it's a game, an analytics engine, a gaming engine, whatever this IP is that you might have, we see this opportunity to leverage this as part of a broader ecosystem to make games as a service happen for some of this clientele."

Aside from the fact that these new clients have very high expectations for these products, a big obstacle facing developers looking to translate their games for new clients is the disillusionment with the word "gamification," and rightfully so.

As Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ian Bogost wrote in his fam​ous 2011 essay (which Boinodiris quotes in her book Serious Games for Business), "gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway."

The hype around gamification is aggravating, to be sure, but as Boinodiris says in her book, it also disguises how the extremely complex technical solutions that game developers invent regularly can benefit other industries.

Whereas the snake oil salesman's gamification pitch usually promises to increase productivity by sweetening the bitter, soul-crushing tasks of your day jobs with some illusive notion of "points," IBM is offering a second use marketplace where game developers can repurpose what was initially created for entertainment and resell it as practical solutions to complicated problems informed by real-world data.

"What we're finding is that most organizations are not ready with their data, but when they see this, just like when we showed it at the Pentagon, they say this is where we need to be, because gaming isn't going away."

If IBM's pitch to developers is just more gamification bullshit, it's the most convincing I've smelled thus far.