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What is the Influence of Gaming on Geotechnology?

This week we ask the question, “What is the Influence of Gaming on Geotechnology?”

Computer gaming has a long history. SimCity was one of the earliest games that incorporated geospatial elements. In the 1980′s this program zoomed to the top of gamer’s favorites list. It featured a crossover game environment-virtual city. Player’s could build their own environments and learn from the process, all the while having fun.

 

The history of gaming has largely been oriented toward fictional characters, places and worlds – virtual. In recent times these worlds have turned toward becoming more reality-based games, built using real information and spatial data and simulating human behavior. This has meant a bridging of game technology with surveying generated data, cadastral and parcel mapping, land use / management software, CAD / GIS / GPS and so on. In the future, highly modeled games based on real spatial data will become even more popular I think.

I am not so sure that gaming is influencing geotechnology as much as geotechnology is influencing gaming. The entertainment world has discovered that while virtual environments are good for fun and pleasure and opportunities exist to apply the same game techniques, to real-world circumstances. After all, it is only a short jump from Building Information Management (BIM) in real life to a game that incorporates BIM elements.

 

Gaming that involves geotechnology has grown in importance for numerous reasons. A convergence of factors has contributed toward this growth. Some of these include,

 

• The rise of agent-based modeling – based upon rule based behavior. For example, if event A happens at place B then a crowd of people will reaction in certain ways. Today we see rule based algorithms in geotechnology databases. ESRI, ORACLE and object oriented databases are cases where this is can be found. This should come as no surprise to GIS and spatially aware folks because such ‘filtering’ of data is the backbone of modeling. In fact, it can be argued that as GIS and geotechnology contribute real-world spatial data into the modeling and gaming environment – games becoming more reality based.

 

• Managing Uncertainty – and the need to control outcomes emanates significantly from terrorism events in recent times, but also because of natural and man-made disasters. Games provide an environment which enables many scenario’s to be played and created, thus establishing the opportunity to learn and understand from them – and to plan. This is of great importance to insurance company’s, flood management agencies etc. In military terms, gaming has a major role, it brings to bear the highest forms of spatial data, tools and human modeled roles, and by this I mean for both war time and peace / conflict resolution purposes.

 

• Integration / Convergence – is increased where gaming occurs. It draws a wider variety of spatial data and demands higher hardware performance and applications that are wider in scope. Few games are 2D, most are 3D and the expectation is 4D – a game without time is somewhat without mojo these days. When we look at this convergence closely, we might say that gaming leads in uncovering more holistic approaches and the discovery of new procedures and methods.

 

• Gaming is shifting science to entertainment – make no mistake, some serious science is embedded into gaming development, tools and products. The shift that is taking place is more subtle, causing science to be fun and the pursuit of knowledge and discovery (key ingredients of science) to be entertaining. This is a very big leap, leading geotechnology to include some entertainment type characteristics. Statistics and probabilities of outcomes are routinely applied to games.

 

Geotechnology offers the real-world through digital elevation / terrain models (DTM/DEM) like we talked about last week. It offers increased accuracy for agent based models based on finer resolution data. It offers several significant possibilities for better spatial modeling of physical processes (cellular automata), delivering them into the gaming world.

 

Gaming is demanding, fast paced and seeks to create a sense of realism (virtual or real) that we don’t normally encounter in maps, though this is changing as maps are becoming more photo-realistic, in some cases. Certainly web-mapping is heading toward gaming, largely through techniques like animation.

 

Overall, gaming offers the possibility for resolving real-world issues, based on real-world data before events can happen. Gaming is modeling in its highest form I suppose. But like all models, they represent simulate outcomes and are by no means certain.

 

Interestingly, we have not really talked much about gaming in the geospatial world. Maybe because it is still associated with child’s play to some. But the reality is, gaming offers the potential to educate and understand the world around us and to construct it with the greatest chances for sustainable outcomes which increase our quality of life. Its applications are in business, education, health, military, environment, planning and many more areas.

 

In the future, I think the role of geotechnology will be to provide raw data into the ‘spaces’ of how we ‘game’ (model) our living, through all scale and space. Interestingly, the surveying community has not jumped on board gaming in a big way. Yet, it is that community that holds the highest accuracy data that can be used to create the most useful applications. Why not feed topographic data into water management gaming? Why not include make virtual farms and manage them with GPS related techniques and technologies linked to stock markets and consumption patterns? Why not develop games that assess data quality linked to surveying data and local planning? This all applies to GIS / CAD as well, though these two have their foot in the door already.

 

Distributed GIS, for example, offer the possibility today, to not only generate spatial data and share it, but to gain feedback from locally created and used spatial services – all of which can become further modelled across networks and ‘gamed’. Why not incoporate real-world complex GIS data and services into games that people can learn about their communities from?

 

We need to explore these possibilities more. We need to understand that what we think as professionals may need to be adapted for consumption and understanding by others. Gaming is a route into the process of change – of understanding communities and relations between people. I would sooner see this done based on real data, than virtual data. This will add even further value to our industry.

 

But, we are likely to see a continuum of ‘gaming environments’ ranging from the pure virtual to the partially-virtual/real to fully engaged real-based simulations. This raises a question, how are we educating people to understand the nature of games use in the geospatial community and what is required to support it? What do we expect from it and what are the possibilities?

 

Additional Information:

• Agent – based Modeling

• My Wonderful World

• Living a Virtual Life

• Touch Lab

• UCL Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis

• Fraunhofer Multi-Agent Systems

• SimCity

 

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Read what Matt Ball has to say on this topic here.

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