Smarts for Serious Games

摘要

You are a firefighter. As a blaze spreads across the factory, a paint canister goes off like a bomb. There are still panicked workers to be cleared. And to make matters worse, one of your crew is injured. How do you proceed?rnDon't worry, it's just a game. But playing it could save lives. Games with ulterior motives such as teaching or training people-known among researchers as "serious games"-are on the rise, providing a cheap and safe supplement to on-the-job training. But serious games face "big problems" because of their simple programming, says Joost Westra, a computer scientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.